Yachting: Egnot pushes for Olympic campaign

Leslie Egnot will have less than a month to find $35,000 to start her Olympic campaign if she gets approval next week from Yachting New Zealand.

Egnot is keen to qualify in the new keelboat class for women, the Yngling, for the Athens Olympics and has a crew ready to compete at the Kiel Regatta from June 21 to 29.

The Kiel is a qualifying regatta.

Her sister Jenny and another Aucklander, Karleen Dixon, will be her crew.

Their entry depends on Yachting NZ being given a third spot in the class at the world championship in Cadiz, Spain, in September.

Two other crews, skippered by Sharon Ferris and Alesha Thorpe, are competing overseas and will be given the two spots New Zealand already has for the championships.

Peter Lester, the high performance manager for Yachting NZ, said the additional place at the world championship would probably be allocated next week.

"They are done on world rankings and we are right on the threshold of getting a third place," he said.

Egnot was a reserve at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

Four years later, she won a silver medal in the women's 470 class with Jan Shearer at Barcelona.

She again teamed with Shearer in Atlanta, but finished down the rankings.



Egnot said she had kept her tentative campaign low-key.

"I haven't talked about it too much because I don't want to get people's hopes up," she said. "It is something that might not happen."



To qualify for Athens, the crew will also have to compete in February's world championships in Sydney.

All three Yngling crews would accumulate their points at the three regattas, and the best crew would go to the Olympics.

- NZPA