Diego Botín and Florian Trittel had two options: to step onto the Marseille regatta course with a calculator in hand or to show why they are the best crew in the world in the men’s skiff class.
The Spanish duo arrived at the medal race with a lead that invited optimism: finishing sixth was enough for them to reach the podium and third place would secure them the gold. But after the trauma Diego Botín experienced at Tokyo 2020, they didn’t leave anything to chance.
At the previous Olympic Games, Botín and López Marra tied with Belgium, but a poor medal race and the tie-breaker based on total points (with no discards) condemned them to a bitter fourth place.
With that trauma fresh in their minds, Botín and Trittel made it clear in Thursday’s races that they would not go out to speculate on the outcome. The lack of wind postponed the fight for medals, but twenty-four hours later, the plan remained the same.
There was no other path for a pair that was born just a few months after Tokyo 2020 and who arrived at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games as the number one in the world ranking.
In 2022, not even reaching a year of working together, Botín and Trittel became European champions and world runners-up; in 2023, they added a world bronze; and in 2024, in the final stretch towards the Olympic Games, they again took world bronze, second in the Olympic Week, and also victory at the Trofeo Sofía in Palma.
Why come out with a calculator in hand? They also had an outstanding issue because, despite having shown enormous consistency throughout the week, they had still not won any races in Marseille.