Welcome to the 470 Team USA email list! As many of you know, we have recently teamed up to campaign for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing in the Women's 470 class. During the past year we have competed in a handful of US regattas and training camps. We won our first regatta together, the US Nationals, placed second at the Miami Olympic Classes Regatta, and are currently ranked 2nd on the US Sailing Team.

This month we are in San Francisco for an intense month of training and competition against the best teams in the world. Our first event, which started yesterday and lasts through tomorrow, is the US Nationals in Santa Cruz. After that we will head up to San Francisco for the North American Championship (August 13-16) and the World Championship (August 22-28).

The Nationals started yesterday, and went about as well as we expected. Work and school have prevented us from sailing the 470 for the past six months, so our boat handling was a bit sloppy and definitely cost us a few points. But our speed was good, both upwind and downwind, and our tactics were solid. We were at the front of the fleet most of the day with some of the top men's teams in the world, so we're fairly confident that with a little practice we'll be winning races. At the end of the day yesterday, we stood in third place among the women's teams (top US women's team), with only the Swedish Olympic Bronze medalists and the Canadian Olympic team ahead of us by 5 and 1 points, respectively.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Olympic sailing, you can learn all about us and our campaign on our website, www.470TeamUSA.com. We will be sending email updates from regattas and training camps, and will be posting copies of the updates on the website. If you want to remove yourself from our email list, please respond to this email with the word "unsubscribe" in the body of the email message. If you would like to subscribe with another email address or know others who would like to join, please sign up through the website.

Thanks for all of your support!

Erin & Alice