Yachting: Aleh and Powrie well placed at world champs

Olympic champions Jo Aleh and Olivia Powrie slipped down the fleet on the second day of the 470 world championships. Photo/onEdition.

Olympic champions Jo Aleh and Olivia Powrie slipped down the fleet to fourth after the second day of the 470 world championships in La Rochelle, France, overnight (NZT) but the real racing starts tonight when finals racing begins.

A new scoring system has been introduced which sees the first two days of racing used as a qualifying series. Effectively, the place they qualify counts as a non-discard race to be counted - Aleh and Powrie will carry four points as the fourth-placed team - meaning the meaningful racing starts now. There are three days of finals racing before the medal race.

Fellow Kiwis Paul Snow-Hansen and Dan Willcox are even better placed in the men's fleet after qualifying third.

Aleh and Powrie went into the second day leading the competition but struggled in the light winds and building current to record an 18th and eighth in their two races.

Their French rivals Camille Lecointre and Mathilde Geron secured top spot heading into the finals with China's Xiaomei Xu and Chunyan Yu in second and Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark of Great Britain, the Olympic silver medallists, in third.

"Bit of a tougher day today,'' Aleh said. "We had a rather dreadful first race. We didn't quite get off the start line and, after that, there were very few passing lanes and any little mistake got compounded.

"The next race was a little better. We only really got the speed going halfway up the first leg, which was a little late, but at least we were still in the mix. So not the best day at all, but some lessons learned and we take a fourth place forward as our carry-forward first race. So the real regatta starts tomorrow.''

Snow-Hansen and Willcox returned another two excellent race results on day two despite the tricky, choppy conditions to retain third overall at the end of the qualifying phase.

They notched a third and a second, to see them progress behind Australia's Matt Belcher and Will Ryan and the French team of Pierre Leboucher and Nicolas Le Berre.

Francisco Lardies and Luke Stevenson are 57th at the start of finals racing and Richard Power and John Power 94th.