Volvo Ocean Race: Successful revenge off Newport: Brunel's gala performance

Dominant, convincing and with an almost casual confidence: this is how America's Cup star and 49er Olympic champion Peter Burling gave Team Brunel an impressive start-to-finish victory as helmsman in the harbour race in Newport. The team on the yellow boat had a clear concept and implemented it right from the start, then quickly pulled away from the field with good positioning. From a 21-second lead over the "home team" Vestas 11th Hour Racing at the first turning mark, the Dutch team finished around an hour into the race, 2 minutes and 30 seconds ahead of the Spanish team Mapfre, which pushed Vestas into third place.

For Team Brunel, however, this victory was only a small consolation for missing out on the stage win on the last long stage from Itajaí to Newport. Mapfre had caught Bouwe Bekking's Team Brunel a few hundred metres before the finish in the unfortunate doldrums. And so Peter Burling was honest in his interview after winning the harbour race: "We would rather have won the leg than the harbour race. But of course this victory is also good. We all knew that the start was crucial today and we did a good job as a team. We hope to come home really strong." By "home" we mean The Hague, the finish harbour of the Volvo Ocean Race. But first, the upcoming leg, which is worth double the points, will take the fleet of seven boats from Newport to Cardiff in the UK over 3,300 Atlantic nautical miles on Sunday.

By then, the stragglers in the in-port race at Newport should also have put the disappointment of their poor results behind them. Behind David Witt's fourth-placed team Sun Hung Kai / Scallywag, Charles Caudrelier's Dongfeng Race Team crossed the finish line in fifth place. The French skipper and his team had hoped for a different result in the ongoing duel with their Spanish sparring partners and friends from Team Mapfre. Simeon Tienpont's team AkzoNobel, skippered by Danish match race ace Nicolai Sehested, had also expected more than sixth place. And the fact that Dee Caffari's team Turn the Tide on Plastic finished seventh, almost ten minutes after the winner Brunel, must have been more than annoying for the ambitious British skipper. She too will do everything she can to reach her home country in as good a position as possible on the Cardiff course.