Stars & Stripes, Everybody Else Qualify For Sailing Semifinals

The fleet racing phase of the World 12-Meter Sailing Championships ended in considerable confusion Wednesday, with Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes and everybody else safely in the semifinals.

All eight competitors--not just the top four as was generally understood--will advance to the match-racing semifinals starting Saturday off this Mediterranean island, a fact the host Costa Smeralda Yacht Club had neglected to announce.

Another previously unannounced fact was that each boat’s worst race did not count in the scoring--in Conner’s case, his last place on Tuesday.

However, Conner would have qualified for the semifinals, anyway. Benefiting from a brief period of strong winds and one huge wind shift, he placed third in Wednesday’s race to finish in fourth place overall. On the first leg, Stars & Stripes collided with Australia’s Steak’n Kidney, which acknowledged blame in the incident. Neither boat was seriously damaged.

New Zealand’s KZ-7 won Wednesday for the second day in a row. The wind started at 8 knots, built to 18, then dropped back to 8. Australia’s Kookaburra II, which finished first in the standings, dropped from second to last in Wednesday’s race when it got caught on the wrong side of a sudden shift on the final reach leg.

The semifinals will be sailed in two round-robin brackets. Stars & Stripes is in with Steak’n Kidney, Sweden’s Entertainer 12 and the Australian-Japanese entry, Bengal.

The winners of each bracket will compete in the best-of-three finals.