West Mersea's Saskia Clark recovered from an awful start to lead the way at the end of the opening day of Olympic action in the women's 470 class sailing.

The 32-year-old sailor, together with helm Hannah Mills set the standard on the first day and the British duo opened up a two-point advantage at the top of the leaderboard.

Having had to wait all week while the rest of the sailing got going, the 470 sailing finally got underway, but Clark and Mills had a nightmare start.

They crashed into a committee boat on the congested start line and had to perform a penalty turn early in the race that set them well back off the pace of the leaders.

However, the British duo came back to record a sixth place in that opening race to show their medal potential and further underlined that in the second race of the opening day as they powered to a first place.

That gave them an overall points tally of seven and kept them ahead of the New Zealand and Israeli boats, who were lying second and third on nine points apiece.

Mills said: “There were some definite nerves this morning, we have been waiting a while to get going and I just think the whole fleet was just excited to finally get out on the water and get some racing in.



“Our goal for today was just not to do anything stupid and immediately we went and crashed into the pin end so we definitely did something stupid.

"But it almost helped us in a way.

"You do your 360 (penalty turn) and you get on with the race, you can’t afford to be nervous after that.

"You’ve got to make a good comeback and we did that really well so we are happy.”

The racing continues on Saturday and concludes with the medal race on August 10.