New balance of power in the Ilca 6 Olympic dinghy for women: Plaaschaert triumphs, Büsselberg impresses

Four months after her Olympic triumph in Japan, Danish class queen Anne-Marie-Rindom is already beaten again: in Oman on Monday, her Belgian rival Emma Plaasschaert won the World Championship in the Ilca-6 dinghy (formerly Laser Radial) for the second time since 2018. Although Denmark's Olympic darling Anne-Marie Rindom had started the final Monday as the front runner, two weak races not only put her off course for the gold medal, but also dashed her hopes of any other world championship medal. Rindom finished the top-ranked series in fourth place.

While Emma Plaasschaert came out on top in the duel with Poland's Agata Barwinska and won her second title, it was 21-year-old Julia Büsselberg from Berlin who stole the show on Monday afternoon, securing fifth place with second place and her final victory of the day and almost sailing onto the World Championship podium - a "sensational result", as not only DSV Sports Director Nadine Stegenwalner found. "Suddenly world class", that must have been the feeling for the young helmswoman from the Seglerhaus am Wannsee club, who had already set an exclamation mark in July with her victory in the Laser Europa Cup against 76 competitors off Warnemünde. At the recently concluded world championships, Julia Büsselberg performed on a par with the best in her field in almost consistently light winds; she was only one point short of Olympic champion Rindom in the final standings. No more than seven points separated her from the title after a total of eleven of the originally twelve planned races.

The maths and computer science student Büsselberg demonstrated her strength not only with the final gala, in which the third race of the day could no longer be held due to the time limit running out. Who knows what else would have been possible for the brilliantly performing Büsselberg? Fifth place at the World Championships marks the greatest success of her young career. "I already felt comfortable in the World Championship area in Oman during training and had confidence in the equipment," said the sailor from Wannsee before the award ceremony. "I started the first day of the World Championships without any great expectations, which always seems to work out well for me." On the evening of the first day, Büsselberg had even taken the lead in the field of 63 starters from 33 nations and was suddenly the talk of the town. Büsselberg countered her early start in the fourth race and two further weaker individual results with a whopping six top-four results, including two victories on the day. "The comebacks were particularly impressive," said Büsselberg's personal coach Thomas Piesker, who celebrated his first World Championship bronze medal with his then protégé and later Laser World Champion Philipp Buhl eight years ago at the same venue in Oman.

DSV Sports Director Nadine Stegenwalner closely followed the World Championships in the Olympic single-handed discipline from Kiel and congratulated: "I'm delighted for Julia, that's an outstandingly strong result, an impressive performance. She achieved top-five results in more than 50 per cent of the races. You have to do that first. Together with Hannah Anderssohn, we now have young Ilca 6 sailors with a lot of potential. Julia Büsselberg's performance was another promising step on the way to success at the upcoming European and World Championships as well as the Olympic Games, following Hannah Anderssohn's success at the European Championships."

Conclusion: Things are happening in the Ilca-6 class, where the balance of power is being reorganised following the retirement, at least temporarily, of Marit Bouwmeester, the outstanding multiple Olympic medal winner. The up-and-coming German female sailors want to have a say in the future. In addition to Julia Büsselberg, this also applies to Hannah Anderssohn from the Warnemünde Sailing Club in Rostock. After taking part in only a handful of major regattas over the past four or five years, the tall, strong-wind sailor still lacks racing experience. Nevertheless, 22-year-old Hannah Anderssohn, who finished sixth in this year's European Championships, has already shown that she is a force to be reckoned with in the future, even though she was unable to achieve a top result at this World Championship with 36th place. "But I'm not ending the World Championships as negatively as you might think," said Hannah Anderssohn in Oman. "Working with DSV coach Maurice Paardenkooper, I was able to realise a lot of things that we are currently working on. I've only been able to compete in a handful of big regattas in recent years due to injuries and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The goal for the coming year is clear: to get as much racing practice in as possible in balance with training."

Julia Büsselberg could hardly believe her outstanding result shortly after the end of the World Championships, smiling as she explained that she was still "a bit in shock", but had eaten an ice cream and looked after her equipment. More important were the initial realisations: "I now know that a medal is possible in big regattas, even if I almost missed out a little annoyingly in the end. It certainly wasn't bad for me that I tried to catch up with the world's best with Svenja Weger and Hannah Anderssohn - each on their own path. None of us Germans have been consistently at the front in our discipline in recent years. That's an additional incentive." When asked whether this best result of her career has changed anything for her, Julia Büsselberg said: "Yes and no. Yes, I definitely want to win an Olympic or World Championship medal one day. But I don't yet know when I should declare it my goal." The medal mission no longer seems impossible