It will be hard to watch from afar, but the team is in good hands with Nathan Outteridge.

The Sydney SailGP event last month was my final event of Season 4. It was a tough decision to make but I believe that it’s the best decision for Swiss SailGP Team and for my goal of winning an Olympic medal for Switzerland this summer.

I will no longer be at the events driving, but the team will be in really good hands with Nathan (Outteridge) behind the wheel, and I will continue to follow and support the team really closely. I wish everyone all the best for these next five events, and I will miss the team very much! I feel that there is a really good mindset in the group. Everyone is working really hard and there is no doubt that the results we deserve will come very quickly.

This weekend for the New Zealand SailGP I will be watching from home in Geneva behind my screen. Thanks to SailGP’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure there is so much data and information available, even if we are supporting remotely, you can still very much be part of it all. It will be a little hard to watch the first few regattas and not be there, but I look forward to following from this new angle.

As we know with SailGP there is also a lot of work done between events too. I will continue to support the development of the team and help by analyzing the regattas, looking objectively at what can be improved. The plan is to return to the wheel of F50 Eiger for the beginning of Season 5, which will be towards the end of this year.

Moving forward for now I will be fully focused on my 49er campaign with Arno de Planta, and goal of winning an Olympic medal. For the past 10 years I've been working towards this moment and this summer, with the Olympics in Marseille, I feel that this dream can become realistic if we keep working hard in these next couple months.

Straight after Sydney, I headed to Lanzarote for the 49er World Championship. The event didn’t quite start as planned, we were 40th after the first day as we had two bad heats and had to carry them all week. We sailed really well for the rest of the event though and were able to bounce back and finished the event in 6th place. It’s still an excellent result, especially from where we started - and it’s such a competitive fleet - but going into the Championship for sure we were aiming for higher.

We’ve had a great training period this winter and felt really ready so we were taken a little by surprise by that first race day. But the event taught us a lot as a team, and we come out of it with lots of positive points. Since Arno and I first started sailing together, along with our Coach, Ian, we have always had good results, even results beyond our expectations.

Having a little challenge and not achieving our goals has allowed us to reflect and change our approaches, which has made us come out of it stronger. We are now heading into a big racing period that will be a very important time for us. We saw that it was perhaps what we have been missing, to line up on big starting lines with a large fleet. That’s why we will quickly continue with Regattas in Palma and Hyeres, followed by the European Championship in May.

In terms of pressure, for sure everyone in the fleet trains hard, everyone pushes hard, everyone wants to arrive at the Olympics as prepared as possible and not leave room for chance. It’s the same for us, we really try to analyze everything we can, to really do everything possible to arrive at the start line without any regrets, and leave no stones unturned.