Puerto Rico Win Optimist Team Racing Worlds

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The team from Puerto Rico were jubilant after winning the Optimist Team event at the 46th Optimist World Championship in Cesme on the west coast of Turkey.
A new record 255 sailors from 54 countries are for the 46th Optimist Worlds, where 16 teams, selected on the first five races of the fleet Worlds, participated in the battle for the Team Racing World title. The event, held over a single day, uses a ‘direct elimination with repechage’ format familiar in other sports. It may look complicated but is based on the simple principle that two defeats eliminate a team.

Top seeds New Zealand had two victories over hosts Turkey and then Uruguay but lost out to Singapore and then Denmark. Puerto Rico, seeded second, overcame Japan but then had much harder matches against Denmark and the US Virgin Islands and in the fourth race lost to Singapore.

But in a repechage system you get a second chance and a victories over Bermuda and again the US Virgin Islands put Puerto Rico into the final. Their opponents Singapore had had a more direct route with successive wins over Italy, Sweden, New Zealand and, as noted, Puerto Rico.

In the ‘best of three’ final Puerto Rico started well in race 1 and went on to win by 13 points to 23. Singapore fought back: the second race was team racing at its most exciting with the young sailors demonstrating superb sailing skills and tactics as the points advantage changed time after time in the last 100 metres before the finish. Finally a jubilant Singapore was declared the winners, 15 points to 21.

As the boats manoeuvred on the line for the start of the final race, the wind increased slightly to a steady 15 knots. The slightly heavier Puerto Rican team seemed to have an advantage upwind and had a winning 1,2,3,7 combination as they rounded mark 1. They maintained their lead although Singapore challenged the third Puerto Rico boat without success. As the boats approached the finish line with Puerto Rico still ahead, they bunched and Puerto Rico was penalized by the umpires. As the boat took its turns penalty, it looked like Singapore might just surge ahead but Puerto Rico had done enough and crossed the line as well deserved World Champions.

The final ranking, with the US Virgin Islands taking bronze, shows the advantage held by small countries which can concentrate their talent in one or two clubs for training in this exciting discipline.

Detailed account and score-sheet at www.optiworld.org/08worldnews.html

Optimist World Championship - www.optiworld2008.com
Robert Wilkes

In Pittsburgh, Posada Takes in All Things Clemente

By Tyler Kepner

Published: June 26, 2008
Click here for original article by New York times.

PITTSBURGH — Jorge Posada is a five-time All-Star, but this week he is an awestruck fan. The Yankees are playing in Pittsburgh, where Roberto Clemente starred for the Pirates, and Clemente is a hero to Posada.

Posada grew up in Puerto Rico, as did Clemente, and he was a year old when Clemente died in a plane crash in 1972. Clemente is revered in his country, and Posada was eager to take a tour of the Clemente museum in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.

He went with another catcher from Puerto Rico, José Molina, and took cellphone pictures of classic Clemente photographs. One is a posed shot of a young Clemente leaping to make a catch, with clouds in the background seeming to form wings on his shoulders. Posada ordered an enlargement of the picture for his home.

Posada said he knows Clemente’s widow, Vera, and he owns a copy of David Maraniss’s acclaimed 2006 biography. But he learned a lot at his tour of the museum.

“Little things, not only baseball stuff,” Posada said. “They wanted him to be in ‘The Odd Couple,’ but he was going to have to hit into a triple play. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘I’m never going to hit into a triple play.’ ”

Posada has a sticker in his home locker supporting the movement to retire Clemente’s No. 21 throughout the majors. He would surely approve of the Clemente quotation that every Pirates player sees on his way from the clubhouse to the dugout at PNC Park: “Whenever I put on my uniform,” it says, “I am the proudest man on Earth.”

Family pool of talent

By Tom Keegan
June 25, 2008

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When a mother goes into labor, a father has one job.

He hurries.

The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t track the quickest trips to the maternity ward, but a Lawrence father of three has iron-clad proof of just how swiftly he hurried when the time arrived.

Twenty-one years and 26 days ago, Tony Portela was on the block, ready to dive into the pool for the 50-meter freestyle at the Pan-American Games trials in Salinas, Puerto Rico, when a meet official stopped the race before it started to inform Portela that his wife, Dorie, had gone into labor.

Portela asked his parents to take Dorie to the hospital and told them he would be right behind them, just as soon as he finished the race. He hurried as no swimmer from Puerto Rico ever had hurried.

“Broke the Puerto Rican record,” Portela remembered like it was yesterday.

The ultra-motivated swimmer then headed to the hospital in Santurce. How long a drive?

“Probably a half hour, 45 minutes,” he said. “My wife will tell you two hours and that the car took every single bump in the road.”

As so often seems the case with the first born, it was a case of hurry up and wait.

“It ended up being a really long labor for my poor wife,” Portela said. “Our son was born the next day.”

Born to swim. Anthony Portela, 21 and a citizen of the United States and Puerto Rico, will spend his Fourth of July trying to swim his way into the Olympics. He qualified to swim at the U.S. Olympic trials in Omaha, Neb., in the 100-meter butterfly.

“Right now I’m seeded about 40th and it’s a goal of mine to make it to the finals, the top 16,” said Anthony, who swims for the University of Minnesota.

His father, who swam for Puerto Rico in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, and his mother, who swam in the U.S. Olympic trials the same year, will be watching. So will his sister Chloe, 15, who starred for the Free State High team that took second in the state this past spring. Anthony also swam for Annette McDonald while at Free State, leading his team to the 2004 state title. Jordan, 9, who swims for the Lawrence Aquahawks, also will be at Qwest Center, cheering on his brother.

For more than a week, Anthony thought he would be following in his father’s wake and swimming for Puerto Rico in the Olympics. Shortly before the qualifying deadline — Puerto Rico uses time standards, rather than having swimmers compete at Olympic trials — Doug Lennox, who swims for Princeton, logged a faster time.

Anthony is spending the summer in Minneapolis. His typical day: Swim from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., work an internship for Target’s dotcom distribution center from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. He saves all his bragging for his sister Chloe’s feats.

“She’s doing great,” he said.

That she is. Chloe qualified to represent Puerto Rico in the FINA World Championships in Monterrey, Mexico, where the family will fly one day after Anthony competes in Omaha.

“I’m sure genes have a little to do with it,” Tony said of the swimming success of their children. “At the same time, they’re very competitive, dedicated. They work very hard.”

It seems as if every member of this friendly Lawrence family was born to swim.

New documentary paints loving portrait of late Pirates' star

Sunday, April 20, 2008

By Diana Nelson Jones, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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As luminous as his life was in just 37 years, Roberto Clemente's post-life has been static in the media 35 years since his death. Even if you couldn't watch him enough when he played and sit riveted to every rehash of clips, footage and remembrances of him, new tidbits are welcome .

Bernardo Ruiz has assembled a documentary of old broadcast moments and well-used commentators, but his one-hour "American Experience" film, "Roberto Clemente" (9 p.m. Monday, WQED), offers fresh faces and insights, too. It also pays proper homage to Clemente's beloved Puerto Rico, its people and to Nicaragua, his last chapter still largely unexplored.

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'American Experience: Roberto Clemente' When: 9 p.m. Monday, PBS.
Narrator: Jimmy Smits

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From his unbringing in the sugar cane fields to his death in 1972, the Pirates' superstar right fielder has become iconic, in part because of his death on a failed flight one mile off the Puerto Rican shoreline. He was bound for Managua, Nicaragua, with supplies for victims of a leveling earthquake eight days earlier.

His body was never recovered.

Described by historian Samuel Regalado as "a complicated individual, because he stepped into some very complicated times," one could argue the Pirates' superstar was complicated regardless; all times are complicated.

He was artistic, musical and open to non-traditional practices, such as chiropractic. He had a sensitive and fiery mind, one so much more active than the average ballplayer's but impeded by delivery in English in a city that had not heard Spanish spoken on broadcasts, if at all.

In Puerto Rico, blacks and whites share the same culture. Here, he found the bewildering and damaging parallel universes that still exist -- maybe the only part of life in Pittsburgh he would recognize were he to come back.

Arguably the richest and most poignant film clip from any World Series clubhouse celebration is included in this film, from 1971: Bob Prince has grabbed the ebullient Clemente, the catalyst of the team's win, for an interview and, before answering, Clemente speaks briefly to his family in Spanish.

The film, narrated by actor Jimmy Smits, includes many interviews with friends, family, teammates historians and writers, including David Maraniss, who wrote "Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero."

Steve Blass, the winning pitcher in the last game of the 1971 World Series, recalls Clemente walking up the aisle to him on the team airplane from Baltimore and saying, "Come here, Blass, let me embrace you."

"What cracked me up about Roberto was in a lot of interviews. ... he would start talking about life," says teammate Al Oliver, "and the writers just weren't ready for that."

Writers Roy McHugh and George Will comment on his eagerness to complain about what ailed him, which Mr. Will said put a lot of people off because it was unseemly for a ballplayer to bare his feelings.

Carol Bass was a girl when she approached Clemente for his autograph after a game, trying out her nascent Spanish and being regaled with a stream of Spanish in return. They became friends and, in fact, she was a guest of the family the night Clemente's doomed plane went down.

Vera Clemente recalls the look her husband gave her as he headed toward that plane: "He looked at me with a very sad look," she said. "I read many things in that look."

Historian Rob Ruck's comment that Clemente, near the time of his death, had blossomed into a man who would transcend baseball, set the stage for Osvaldo Gil's teary conclusion to the film.

Mr. Gil wondered what sense to make of his friend's death, and said his mother gave him "the only explanation that made sense," he said. "'If he had died as a player, only the sports fans would have remembered him. But because he died while helping others, the wider world would know him as a humanitarian.' "

Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.

First published on April 20, 2008 at 12:00 am