End of the Olympics

Competing at the Olympic Games has always been a dream I have wanted to achieve.  To get that opportunity for a 2nd time has been an amazing opportunity.  Competing at the highest level of a sport is not easy and the differences between reaching your goals and failure are slim.  

Our goal coming into this event was to compete with the best in the World and at the end of the week be in the position to bring home a medal.  I wish I could say that this is exactly what happened and things went just as we planned and practiced.  That did not happen this week and I will not hold back the feeling of loss and disappointment that I have in the results of the past week.

I will never question the sacrifice and commitment that we have made over the past few years.  We set out a plan and I can confidently say that we executed it exactly how we wanted.  I have always believed in setting a plan for big events, following it and believing in the plan.  This has always been our avenue to success and I know it will be our avenue to success in the future.

Sometimes your plan leads you to success and other times you fail.  When your goals are set high the risk of failure increases and as an athlete you have to embrace that risk.  I have never been afraid of failure and I have never let it beat me in the past.  If anything I learn from it and make myself better.

This failure has been the hardest for me in my career and I would be lying to say that I have moved on already.  We felt prepared, we trained hard, sacrificed everything we needed to be successful and felt confident in how to attack the race course and the conditions in Weymouth.  Our plan did not lead us to the goal we had set for ourselves.  Why?  Well to be honest we do not know right now, it has only been a few days and we will need some significant time to analyze almost 4 years of training.  Our results coming into this event gave us every indication that we were prepared to compete for a medal and that is what makes this so hard to accept.

I have had a tremendous amount of support to get to this point and I would like to thank everyone for helping me get to the Olympics in 2012.  Even though this has been a disappointing week it has not been a disappointing last 4 years.  We have had a lot of success and I could not have achieved any of it without your continued support for which I am incredibly grateful.  

I also know that there will be criticism for my performance and that comes with the territory and you have to embrace that also.  I know the effort we made over the past few years and I will not allow the criticism to deter my resolve to comeback stronger from this event.  You put yourself out there for people to judge your performances.  I can promise you that my own desires to reach my goals and the disappointment of not reaching them will far outweigh what others can say about my performance.

Since the competition I have been experiencing the other racing and competitions at the Olympics and have been enjoying the experience of being at an Olympic Games.  We will be heading to London for the closing ceremonies which is going to be a fantastic event and then we will be heading home.

Where do we go from here?  I am not sure yet but I am excited about some opportunities to expand into different areas of the sport.  I would love to do some sailing outside of the Olympic circuit and hope that the opportunity presents itself in the near future.  I love the Olympic circuit but I also want to do some offshore sailing and some team sailing on larger boats.  We will soon find out what will happen with these dreams and goals.  

Even though we failed to reach our goals this has been an amazing experience and I thank each of you for your continued support.  I will learn from this and will put those lessons towards a new goal in the very near future!!  

Zach