Silver medal for Eve McMahon at the U21 Youth World Championships
MEDAL ALERT! Eve McMahon takes silver at the U21 ILCA Youth World Championships today (Sunday 28 August 2022). This medal marks the best U21 world championship result for Ireland in the ILCA 6 (formerly Laser Radial) class.
Congratulations to Irish Sailing’s Eve McMahon who has secured her second place and silver medal at the U21 ILCA Youth World Championships in the ILCA 6 (formerly Laser Radial) which finished up in Vilamoura, Portugal earlier today after another day with no racing. A total of seven races were completed over the week due to lack of wind. Eve also won the U19 category.
Already this summer Eve achieved a hat-trick of gold medals winning the ILCA 6 Youth World Championships in Texas, the World Sailing Youth World Championships in the Netherlands and the ILCA6 Youth European Championships in Greece.
Rory Fitzpatrick, Irish Sailing Head Coach commented “Eve moved up a category for this championship, so it was a tougher fleet with some older and more seasoned girls who have been to the Olympic Games.
And it was a challenging event; there were only seven races over the series and most of them were in very light, fickle sailing conditions. Eve had a couple of big setbacks early on when she had a race that she finished quite well, inside the top ten, that was then abandoned when she finished the race, and then she got two yellow flag penalties in race three. So any mistake after that point would have given her 81 points on top of her overall score and put her way down the fleet, so there was a lot of pressure on her not to make any mistakes.
She really, really showed a lot of resistance, and really hustled. She sailed a good consistent strategy for the regatta and it took an outstanding performance from the Belgian girl to beat her. It's a bittersweet win for Eve, but she has another few years at this category to come back and get the gold !”.
The overall winner of the championship was Eline Verstraelen of Belgium in the girls, and Ole Schweckendiek of Germany in the boys ILCA 7 (Laser) fleet.
In the boys fleet, ILCA 7 (Laser) Irish sailors Tom Higgins finished in 10th place, Jamie McMahon in 24th and Jonathan O’Shaughnessy in 106th. Irish sailor Ellen Barbour finished in 68th.
See full event results HERE