On the third day of the Rio Paralympic sailing regatta, Ireland's John Twomey from Kinsale Yacht Club with crew Ian Costelloe and Austin O'Carroll are back into the top ten overall after counting a fifth in race six of the three person Sonar keelboat class. Ireland scored also scored a 9th and 13th yesterday moving them up to tenth overall. Full results here.
Race day three. Three people in a boat. Three races. Three wins. If three isn't the lucky number for Great Britain's Robertson, Stodel and Thomas then it certainly should be after today.
Languishing in the bottom half of the fleet with a 11,9,14 on the scorecard it looked like the chase for a medal was over before it had begun for the British team. Whatever went on in the nightly debrief after day two, it definitely worked.
Not giving too much away, Thomas said, "Some of the stuff we talked about last night in the debrief we came out on the water today and implemented.”
He continued, "The debrief from last night was mainly to believe. Which then allowed us to follow our plan. So believe and then execute with a positive mindset. We love the medium to strong breeze and we have been working on a few techniques with our new coach which are working.”
If the team is to continue up the leaderboard and get a first Paralympic medal in their fourth attempt, they will need a lot more of that belief that worked so well, but they also need boats around them to falter. For Thomas though, their destiny is still in their own hand's, "All we have to do is worry about our own performance and not worry about the others. Having three firsts makes you feel positive and I'm not sure how that has helped us with the overall scores. The boat is going well now, and we can't influence others.
"For us it is about sticking to our processes and coming out strong and delivering on what we can do. If we can then be in the medal zone we will be happy.”
The Britons now sit in fifth place on 23 points.
Still leading the way are the Australian team of Colin Harrison, Russell Boaden and Jonathan Harris who posted two second places and a discarded seventh for the day to leave the team on 12 points. They are followed in second by 2016 world champions Alphonsus Doerr, Hugh Freund and Bradley Kendell (USA) who rocketed up from seventh place with a 2,3,3 to finish on 18 points.
New Zealand's Richard Dodson, Andrew May and Chris Sharp are third on 21 points with London 2012 bronze medallists, Norway's Aleksander Wang-Hansen, Marie Solberg and Per Eugen Kristiansen just one point back on 22.