Morrison & Rhodes keep a cool head and their racing in perspective as they climb the rankings
A bubbling Stevie Morrison came off the water proudly displaying two 49er bullets that he and Ben Rhodes grabbed in the two harbour races today.
Their stellar performance put them in silver medal position overall with the tiny matter of 11 points separating them from the feared Australians Nathan Outteridge and Iain Jensen, who by their standards had a shocker of a day with a tenth followed by a sixth with a performance littered with errors.
Morrison and Rhodes, by contrast, made no errors and sailed two flawless races, nailing the starts and showing good boat speeds.
“We’ve had really good boat speed all week but we executed the starts a lot better today,” said Morrison.
“They were middle of the line and safe but we did a good job and were confident to attack it. The fleet was not too aggressive on the line for some reason.
Day three of the 49er racing was the British pair’s best day so far having opened their campaign with two 12th places followed by a third and a discardable 18th. They were not doing anything different, Morrison said but the results were a dream.
“You get up every day thinking you can win whichever race is put in front of you but to do it at the Olympic games is unbelievable.
“We can smile and feel happy with ourselves until dinner time tonight then after dinner, we have to get back to reality.
“We have eight races left which is an awful lot. We have really good equipment and are going really fast.
“We have to be boring, just going through what we do every day and not be too emotional. A few hints of grey and a few more years on the clock and it means you can stay a little bit more level. ….we need to bore ourselves to a gold medal.”
“We will keep going out and doing what we do. We felt at the start we could beat Nathan and Iain and we still feel that and I imagine they started feeling they could beat us and I imagine they still feel that too so we have to be very dull and keep going.”