Bronze for Archie Cropley & Max Paul at Youth Worlds

MHYC members Archie Cropley and Max Paul have claimed the Bronze medal in the Boys 29er class at the 2019 Hempel Youth Sailing World Championships in Gdynia, Poland.

409 sailors from 66 nations were racing across nine youth events including the Boy's and Girl's divisions of the 29er, 420, RS:X and Laser Radial as well as the Mixed Multihull, the Nacra 15. The best youth sailors from 28 nations contested 13 races in the 29er Boys series.

The Australian Youth Team was selected from performances across class and youth championships last summer and with a strong mix of returning Youth World Championships sailors and newcomers, the team had put in intensive training hours to tackle the best young sailors in the world this past week. It will be Max Paul’s last year in the youth classes, while 16-year old Archie Cropley still has a couple years ahead of him.

After three days of racing, Cropley & Paul were sitting in second place behind last year’s winners Norway.

“It’s been pretty good so far. We started a bit slow into the regatta and had a pretty light breeze the first couple of days, but we kept it pretty consistent and stayed close with the top pack. And today we did pretty well and had a bit more breeze which was a bit more beneficial for us,” Max Paul said.

The sailors from Middle Harbour Yacht Club not only put in their strongest day so far, but also had one of the best capsize recoveries of the day, with witnesses drawing comparisons to Olympic champions Nathan Outteridge and Ian Jensen’s race at London 2012.

“We had three races in 15 knots and the last one was probably reaching 20 knots and we had a really good day with a fourth, first and a third. In the last race of the day we hit a big set of waves on the downwind in a big puff and we couldn’t really do anything except pin pole, stick the nose in. So we had a pretty big capsize, but we recovered really well and were tenth at the bottom mark and third again around the top mark. So we did recovered really well to keep up there,” Archie Cropley described the incident.

Unfortunately the stronger breezes did not persist for the remainder of the regatta and the crew from Finland posted a series of bullets on the last two days of lighter winds to overtake the Australians.

Sydney sailors Will Cooley and Rebecca Hancock won gold in the Mixed Nacra 15 with one day to spare. The lead in the Nacra 15 changed on a daily basis but it was the Australians who ultimately prevailed.

The race for gold went down to the wire in the Boy’s Laser Radial fleet on Friday with Western Australia’s Zac Littlewood in the lead going into the final day.

The Western Australian, who won bronze at last year’s world championships, claimed two seconds on Thursday to remove local hopeful Tytus Butowski (POL) from top spot but just one point splits the pair. In the final race, bot sailors posted disappointing results to allow the Turkey’s Yigit Yalcin Citak to overtake them to claim the Gold. Littlewood retained the Silver medal.