Irish show real progress during Palma regatta

Sailing Column:In the aftermath of last week's Palma Olympic Classes Regatta, the prospect of two major events this summer will be brought into sharp focus for the official squad and contenders.

With these events looming, the slimming process to only the most competitive prospects gets under way.

The World Sailing Championships at Caiscais, Portugal, at the end of June and the second Pre-Olympic test event at Quindao, the venue for the Beijing 2008 regatta, are set to be the best indicators for the scale and standard of the final squad in its formative stage.

Last week's regatta marked the first of the Eurolymp regattas, a series of ISAF grade one standard events that form the building blocks for the sailing athletes. Though officially a grade two event, the attendance at Palma of some 1,500 sailors was acknowledged to be of the higher grade and from next year will be part of a new Sailing World Cup series encompassing already established events over a six-month period on three continents.

Aside from light and shifty breezes along with some incredibly erratic race-management policies introduced recently by ISAF - more later - the series provided some positive progress for the 17 Irish sailors.

The best result came from Maurice "Prof" O'Connell with Ben Cooke, who reached the top 10 in the Star class and qualified for the medal race final day. Max Treacy with Anthony Shanks missed out on the top 10 but both are going head to head this week at the same venue for the Star Spring European Championships that will help determine which of the pair will enter the squad ahead of the summer's major events. It was encouraging to see the co-operation between the two Star campaigns when Cooke had to return to Ireland before the medal race due to illness. Shanks switched to crew for O'Connell, ensuring the Irish boat's presence in the final.

Brothers Russell and Matt McGovern in the 49er Skiff class sailed an excellent regatta and their growing confidence is showing.

In the Finn single-hander, Timothy Goodbody took a race win in the series and is proving a strong challenge for Aaron O'Grady, the longer-established campaigner. However, the latter was sailing a strange and new boat - Goodbody's new boat, loaned to him when his own failed to arrive from Miami - and has time to prepare for Hyeres Week at the end of this month to recover form.

Hard choices are looming too as the Laser Radial girls are closely matched. Ciara Peelo and Debbie Hanna finished in the Gold fleet last week but telling the pair apart for selection purposes will be an unenviable task.