Mussanah Race Week: Indian sailors shine with seven medals in Oman

Young Indian sailors put up an impressive show and returned with a rich haul of seven medals, including one gold, four silver and two bronze at the Mussanah Race Week in Oman, an international regatta for youth sailors.

India ruled the Optimist Girls U-15 category with Shreya Krishna Lakshminarayanan and Kommaravelly Lahari securing the first two spots.

Shreya bagged the gold medal with a net score of 28 points.

She put in a strong performance, finishing second and third in her first and fifth races respectively.

Across six races, her other finishes were ninth, sixth, eighth and 24th in her final race, which was discarded as her worst result under the scoring system that dropped the worst finish.

Her total score was 52 points, but after the discard her net score was 28, giving her the gold medal.

Kommaravelly followed with silver, finishing with 50 net points, while Singapore’s Tong Xuan Ya claimed bronze.

In the ILCA-4 U-16 category, India’s Shashank Batham and Akshat Kumar Dohare won silver and bronze respectively.

Shashank finished just two points behind Oman’s Abdulatif Ziyad Al Qasim, who topped three of the seven races (second, third and fourth) and won by 12 net points.

Shashank won two races (first and sixth), but finished ninth in the second race, which hurt his chances for gold.

His worst race was discarded, leaving him with a total of 14 net points.

Akshat secured bronze with a score of 29 net points after seven races.

In the ILCA-4 girls U-16 category, India’s Soumya Singh Patel and Shagun Jha secured second and third positions respectively.

Soumya collected a net 39 points while Shagun finished with 49 points.

Marwa Al Hammadi of the UAE claimed gold with 31.5 net points.

In the ILCA-6 girls U-19 category, Maanya Reddy narrowly missed the gold, finishing second with 74 net points, just behind Camelia Al Qubaisi of the UAE, who secured gold with 77 points.

A total of 106 sailors from Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Thailand, Singapore and India took part in the three-day annual age group sailing event from October 4 to 7, with races in the Optimist Boys and Girls ILCA 4, ILCA 6, ILCA 7 and RS Venture classes.

The Optimist Class is a single-design dinghy class for young sailors, typically between 8 and 15 years old, with a scoring system that drops the worst finish from a sailor’s total points to calculate the net score.

The ILCA (Laser) class is a class for one-handed dinghies with different rig sizes (ILCA-4, ILCA-6, ILCA-7) for different age groups, using a similar net point scoring format. It is popular for its competitiveness and Olympic status.

(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – PTI)