THE FINAL
M Sol (BRA) / P Novotna (CZE) / B Kajiya (BRA) / C Leon (ESP)
Conditions remained strong here, but perhaps just a bit steadier and somewhat lighter than the difficult semis. The women were still riding 6 and 7m kites.
Once again, as we saw at the last event in Mauritius, after storming her first round and then delivering a below par performance to squeak through the semi-finals with just three scoring tricks, Mikaili Sol was seeded lowest for the final, which meant that she had the supposed disadvantage of taking her tricks first in rotation.
However, as she managed to do in Mauritius, it was the solid side of Mikaili that came out of the blocks, and she started the heat with a 8.23 points for a superb grabbed slim. She led from trick one and never looked back. Novotna was up next and couldn’t ride out of a fast 313 landing while Kajiya then missed an S1 attempt. Leon gritted her teeth and held on tightly to a hard backside 313 landing and got good 6 point score.
On her second trick, once again Mikaili threw her manoeuvre within the first ten seconds of her allowed minute, just yards from the beach. She’d obviously seen that the water was a bit flatter there, and somehow she seems to need virtually no trick set-up time to stabilise herself.