Joana Santos Silva Ferreira Pratas (born 28 November 1978) is a Portuguese former sailor, who specialized in the

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

class. She was selected to compete for Portugal in three editions of the Olympic Games (1996, 2000, and 2004), posting scores lower than the top twenty, respectively, in all of her career meets. Pratas made her Olympic debut, as a seventeen-year-old teen and one of the first Portuguese women to compete in sailing, in

Atlanta 1996 Atlanta 1996 may refer to: * 1996 Summer Olympics * 1996 Summer Paralympics The 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, were held from August 16 to 25. It was the first Paralympics to get mass media sponsorship, and had a bud ...

, finishing twenty-fifth overall in the

class with a satisfying net grade of 209. At the

2000 Summer Olympics The 2000 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXVII Olympiad, officially branded as Sydney 2000, and also known as the Games of the New Millennium, were an international multi-sport event held from 15 September to 1 October ...

in Sydney, Pratas accumulated a net score of 141 points at the end of eleven-race series to pick up the twenty-first overall spot in the

regatta, due to the expense of her superb top-ten feat on the opening leg. Eight years after competing in her first Games, Pratas qualified for her third Portuguese team, as a 31-year-old, in the

class at the

2004 Summer Olympics The 2004 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad (), and officially branded as Athens 2004 (), were an international multi-sport event held from 13 to 29 August 2004 in Athens, Greece. The Games saw 10,625 athletes ...

in Athens, by placing among the top 40 and receiving a berth from the 2003 ISAF World Championships in

Cádiz Cádiz ( , , ) is a city in Spain and the capital of the Province of Cádiz in the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Andalusia. It is located in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula off the Atlantic Ocean separated fr ...

, Spain. Pratas started the race series comfortably with a magnificent runner-up finish to Norwegian sailor and eventual champion

Siren Sundby Siren Sundby (born 2 December 1982 in Lørenskog) is a former Norwegian sailor. She won an Olympic gold medal in the Europe-class in the 2004 Summer Olympics. She also won the world championships in the Europe-class in 2003 and 2004. Sundby w ...

, but an unexpectedly disastrous feat on the succeeding legs of the regatta saw Pratas tumble down the leaderboard, leaving her farther from the field in twenty-second overall position with 169 net points.

References

External links

* * * 1978 births Living people Portuguese female sailors (sport) Olympic sailors for Portugal Sailors at the 1996 Summer Olympics – Europe Sailors at the 2000 Summer Olympics – Europe Sailors at the 2004 Summer Olympics – Europe Sailors (sport) from Lisbon {{Portugal-yachtracing-bio-stub