Dutch sailors mistakenly stop short of the finish in gold medal race

NPR is in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics. For more of our coverage from the games head to our latest updates.

Even elite sailors can get confused about where the finish line is.

The Netherlands’ world champion skiff duo of Annette Duetz and Odile van Aanholt sailed to a gold medal on Friday, but not before they mistakenly stopped short in a race they had led from the start.

"It was a bit crazy because we crossed the finish and we didn't hear a horn so we knew something was wrong,” van Aanholt said afterward.

The Dutch team had little margin for error. Heading into the final after 12 races, they were trailing France’s Sarah Steyaert and Charline Picon by just one point in the women’s skiff, which uses a high-performance 49erFX boat.

So when Duetz and van Aanholt held off their rivals to clear the last buoy and head toward the boat marking the finish line, they were able to breathe a sigh of relief.

They stopped racing, “dropped their spinnaker and rounded up slightly to watch the finish of the other boats,” as Sail-World reports.

There was just one problem: The actual finish line was marked by two smaller boats further along the course. Van Aanholt and Duetz had taken a slight detour — and now they watched in alarm as boats from Sweden and Italy raced to the actual finish line.

In a sudden frenzy, the Dutch pair were able to recover enough speed to maneuver back on-course and squeeze into third place, two seconds ahead of New Zealand — and high enough to guarantee them gold in the overall competition. They acknowledged later that they hadn’t realized race officials had altered the course. 

“We are very happy with our resilience there. We were super quick as a team to say, 'OK, this is plan B, let's go,' ” van Aanholt said. “We couldn't have done it any better in the end. So it's just relief. I'm very, very happy."

The Dutch won gold with a score of 74 in the event, in which the lowest score wins. Sweden’s Vilma Bobeck and Rebecca Netzler followed with silver at 76, while France claimed bronze with 79. 

The sailing finals at the regatta off the Marseilles coast had been scheduled for Thursday, but weak winds — a common theme this week — forced a one-day delay.

The American boat of Stephanie Roble and Maggie Shea was close on the Netherlands’ heels coming up to the finish — but they then dropped speed and turned, seemingly under the same mistaken impression as the Dutch about what turned out to be a false finish. In the overall standings, the U.S. team finished in the middle of the pack of the 20-boat field.