QINGDAO // Denmark's Jonas Warrer and Martin Kirketerp Ibsen will keep the Olympic 49er sailing gold medal they won after a protest was dismissed today. The protest by the race committee followed an extraordinary medal race yesterday in which Warrer and Ibsen, leading their nearest rivals by 11 points, sailed in Croatia's boat after their mast broke on the way to the start. The 49er fleet is a one-design class, meaning all the boats are virtually identical, and the Danes could have been disqualified on technicalities, rather than having been deemed to have enjoyed any unfair advantage.
"I can confirm that the protest against Denmark has been dismissed and that no penalties will be applied," the jury member John Doerr told reporters. "The medal placings remain unaltered." Doerr said a full statement would be made available later today. Spain's Iker Martinez and Xavier Fernandez, the defending champions, retain silver and the German brothers Jan Peter Peckolt and Hannes Peckolt win bronze.
The jury, who sat late last evening and formed again today, finally reached a decision some 19 hours after the medal race had finished. Ibsen said the wait had been "surreal". "I would not wish it on my worst enemy," he told reporters. "In my heart I hoped we would keep it. You are down, you are up, you think you have won and then you are down again. It's been unreal." After their mast broke, the Danes returned to the marina, swapped boats with the already eliminated Croatians and started the race just seconds before the deadline, some four minutes after the rest of the fleet had begun racing.
The Danes trailed in seventh, enough to put them in gold medal position, in a race featuring numerous capsizes and with the destiny of the gold medal changing hands several times. They crossed the line nearly 12 minutes behind race winners Martinez and Fernandez. The Denmark team manager Michael Staal said the jury's decision had been "a victory for sportsmanship and sailing over paperwork". "This was not about justice, it was about sportsmanship and trying to go by the book for a very complex sport which cannot be ruled completely by the book and paragraphs," Staal added.
*Reuters
