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| Anders Bringal, photo courtesy of Eric Bellande |
Today was spectacular, with two of the worlds best windsurfers breaking the 50knot barrier. The first to break it was Anders Bringal with 50.41knots, and then 50.46knots. There was a lot of speculation online at official Luderitz Speed Challenge facebook page. After a couple of hours of national records falling all went quiet for an hour. This was after Jurjen van de Noord posted that the 50knot barrier had been broken. This was followed by an official post saying Anders had 49.31 so no one knew who had broken the 50knot barrier.
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| Antoine Albeau and Cedric Bourdes on the Tandem Windsurfer. photo courtesy of Eric Bellande |
Previous posts from the day included many showing Antoine and Cedric Bourdes breaking records on the tandem, with a final score of 38.12knots. Cedric, Anders and Antoine all had one extra run posted before a media blackout. Cedric at this point took the record to 49.66knots. Then all went quiet, a post was made saying all three were consistent with approximately 49.5knots.
Many of us sat waiting, posting messages begging for news and quite a lot of daft messages as well. It was nail biting stuff, but I really enjoyed it as did many others who were waiting.
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| Antoine Albeau looking quite pleased with himself. Photo courtesy of Eric Bellande |
Finally Antoine Albeau took the record to a staggering 50.59knots. If you click on the photo to the right and enlarge it you can see a very interesting tail on Antoines board, looks like the back footstrap is designed to be even further back then the fin.
This is still hot off the press, as I type this the posts have appeared on GPS Speedsurfing so here are the links with the full stats for these three.
This is still hot off the press, as I type this the posts have appeared on GPS Speedsurfing so here are the links with the full stats for these three.
As you can see there is not much between them at the moment, and Patrik Deithelm is also within this group at the top. Antoine has the highest peak and 500m, Anders has the highest 5x10sec average.
A lot of credit also needs to go to the other competitors out there. First and foremost Zara Davis managed to increase the womens record to 44.69knots. Her husband Pete had this to say;
Great news and bad news for Zara..................... She broke her womens world record again with an amazing run of 44.69 knots. But on the last run of the day she fell past the finish line and was caught by a gust and hit the mast hard and had to be taken to hospital for 7 stiches. "Zara says it was a great day and I am fine and will be back for the next session on Sat. when I hope to go faster!!!"There are pictures on her facebook site, I won't publish them here as they are not for the faint hearted. Hope it doesn't hurt too much Zara! I think the scar will be a great story for her in the future, having got it the day she got the womens speed record.
The rest of the results are as follows; (click the links for GPS-Speedsurfing.com stats, the 500m on GPSSS will be a little higher as they may have done their best 500m including part of the run in to the course)
Patrick Diethelm: 49.71 kts - Swiss National Record (currently ranked 3rd fastest ever)
Nick Vardalachos: 48.84 kts - Greek National Record
Farrell O Shea: 48.21 kts - UK National Record
Mark Grinnell: 46.49 kts
Matthias Rottcher: 46.69 kts - South African National Record
Jurjen Van Der Noord: 47.53 kts - Netherlands National Record
Christian Benzing: 45.57 kts - German National Record?
Christian Bornemann: 45.28 kts
Lena Erdil: 43.5 kts Turkish National Record
The next couple of days are forecast lighter winds, but Friday and Saturday are looking like more record breaking days. Good luck to all out there. OH.....and just look at this, how can anyone even contemplate a gybe at those speeds ;-)
Good speeds and winds
The Bus
Late Edit for those not used to GPS rankings - The GPS-Speedsurfing.com site is a fun ranking site, the scores currently show AB on top, this is for a 5x10second average, not for 500m. This does highlight how close they actually are, the game is on this weekend!
The official scores are as posted above, and can be confirmed on the Luderitz Speed Challenge site linked to above. Hope that makes sense.
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