Diego Botin y Florian Trittel They had two options: go out onto the Marseille regatta field with calculator in hand or ready to show why they are the best crew in the world in the men’s skiff class.
The Spanish couple arrived at the medal race with an advantage that invited optimism: sixth place was enough to get on the podium and third place to get their hands on gold. But after the trauma that Diego Botín went through in Tokyo 2020, they left nothing to chance.
In the previous Olympic Games, Botín and Lopez Marra They tied with Belgium, but a bad medal race and the tiebreaker based on total points (without discards) condemned them to a bitter fourth place.
With that trauma still in mind, Botín and Trittel made it clear during Thursday’s races that they would not go out to speculate on the result. The lack of wind postponed the fight for the medals, but twenty-four hours later the plan was the same.
There was no other way for a couple who were born just a few months after Tokyo 2020 and who arrived at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games as number one in the world rankings.
In 2022, without even reaching a year of working together, Botín and Trittel were European champions and world runners-up; in 2023 they won a world bronze; and in 2024, in the final stretch towards the Olympic Games, they won another world bronze, second in the Olympic Week and also won the Sofia Trophy in Palma.
Why go out with a calculator in hand? They also had a score to settle, because although they had shown great consistency during the week, they had not yet won a race in Marseille.
