Olympic champion Tunnicliffe turns on style at Largs

OLYMPIC gold medallist Anna Tunnicliffe proved she has lost nothing from her speed and guile after her break this season from the Laser Radial class as she returned to notch first and second place from the first two races of the World Championships which opened today on the Clyde estuary off Largs.

American Tunnicliffe shared best points from the day in the Blue fleet with Holland's Marit Bouwmeester, world ranked two, who mirrored the American's tally with a second and a first. In the Yellow fleet it was Belarus' 2007 world champion Tatiana Drosdovskaya who led from the first windward mark to be followed across the finish line of the first race by China's Olympic bronze winner Lijia (Lucy) Xu, with Paige Railey, the 2005 world champion, taking third. Railey then went on to win the second race to lie third overall after the first day.

In the Men's fleets it was a Polish one-two as Wojciech Zemke held off the defending champion Marcin Rudawski by scoring a perfect pair of wins.

The second contest was raced in a diminishing westerly breeze. The second downwind in particular just edged into really difficult territory with big swings in wind direction. For the host nation's Skandia Team GBR, Ali Young proved the most consistent with a sixth and ninth to lie 11th overall, whilst Scot Charlotte Dobson, ranked third in the world, was less happy with her 21st in the first race but fought hard to score a seventh in the second heat to lie 23rd.