Ryan has recently moved from sailing in the Laser class to the 49er class, but this didn’t stop the Carrick born sailor from entering and winning the Irish Senior National Laser Championship at the end of August.
Ryan admits that his focus is 110% on the 49er class but had a free weekend so travelled to the event and won it!
“I had a free weekend and just decided to compete, I was pleased with winning the event, I was 2nd in 2008 and 2007 so it was nice to win it this year!”
“The 49er race is my main event and my main focus, Matt McGovern and I set up a new 49er team in April 2009.
The plan is to qualify and compete in London 2012, but that is a long way off. We are competing at Sail for Gold next week and then we hope to relocate to Australia for 6 weeks later in the winter to train.
This training time would allow us to train with the current World Champions and there are three events which we can compete in while we are in Australia, the main event being Sail Melbourne.”
Following on from their time in Australia training Matt and Ryan hope to travel to the World Championships in the Bahamas. This event is the last World Cup event before the Olympic qualifiers in Perth 2011.
Ryan is full of praise for sailing partner Matt and had this to say about him,
“Matt is regarded as one of the top crews in the world circuit at the moment and yes we are a new team but training has been going very well so far. We were 46th in the Worlds earlier this year, which was our first event together, so we were quite pleased with that.
At the minute we are not focusing too heavily on our results, but more on building our team foundations, the results will come in time.
I have learnt a lot from Matt since I moved into the 49er class, Matt has been through an Olympic qualifying campaign and narrowly missed out on going to Beijing so we are both determined to qualify for London.”
Both Ryan and Matt are funded through the Sport Northern Ireland Athlete Support Programme and have a tailor made SINI support programme built around their competition plans, SINI work closely with their coach and provide services such as Sports Psychology, Strength and Conditioning and Performance Nutrition.
