Four down, six to go: State of play at the 2026 Semaine Olympique Française

Four champions crowned in Hyères on Friday afternoon, six to come on Saturday, and a week of weather that ran from light-air chess to 20-knot chop leaves the 57th Semaine Olympique Française set up for a pivotal final day.

Here’s where each class stands after five days of racing…

Spain's Jordi Xammar Hernández and Marta Cardona Alcántara sit on a decent cushion going into Saturday's medal race, but it took them a couple of days to find top gear. In the lighter airs of Monday and Tuesday it was an Italian procession: Elena Berta and Giulio Calabrò led on day one, Giacomo Ferrari and Alessandra Dubbini took over on Tuesday, and for a while it looked like Hyères was going to belong to the Italians.

Then the breeze came in on Wednesday. Xammar and Cardona, the Palma champions, won all three races in 20-odd knots of easterly – a performance Xammar summed up as a "perfect day" after admitting they'd been "a bit sleepy" at the start of the week. They backed it up on Thursday with a third and a win to open a ten-point lead, and held steady on Friday with a second and a fourth in the calmer southwesterlies.

Britain's Martin Wrigley and Bettine Harris have been the model of consistency in second. France's Matisse Pacaud and Lucie de Gennes sit third, while the Italian Ferrari-Dubbini duo, restored to form in Friday's lighter breeze with two race wins, are fourth and still within punching distance.

If you’re looking for a shoot-out on Saturday, it's here. Four different boats have led the 49er this week and there's still nothing you'd call settled.

USA's Andrew Mollerus and Trevor Bornarth started strongly alongside compatriots and SOF 2025 champions Nevin Snow and Ian MacDiarmid, who described the opening day as "champagne sailing, like playing chess while running." They held the lead for the first two days.

Then Wednesday's big breeze came and the leaderboard was shaken up. Ireland's Robert Dickson and Sean Waddilove, fourth at Paris 2024, took the lead. France's Erwan Fischer and Clément Péquin climbed above them on Thursday with a 3-1-2, talking afterwards about keeping a "good mood" and working on the mental side.

Now, after Friday's racing, China's Zaiding Wen and Tian Liu are on top – a quiet 8-3-4 that was the most consistent card in a day where others drowned in double-digit scores. Fischer and Péquin are second, Dickson and Waddilove third, and the gaps through the top ten have contracted. With a westerly forecast to build towards 20 knots by late morning on Saturday, the conditions may yet favour a completely different set of boats.

The Italians love the light, as their coach kept pointing out, and on Friday Sofia Giunchiglia and Giulia Schio proved it. Three race wins out of four put them back on top of the FX, which they'd led out of the opening day before losing it to China's Yingqian Wang and Xiaoya Su on day two, and then again to the fast-improving Australians Laura Harding and Annie Wilmot in the middle of the week.

Harding and Wilmot were the story of Wednesday and Thursday, winning both races on Wednesday to hop up the table. On Friday, though, a 2-4-13-11 against the Italian resurgence put them second overall. Sweden's Vilma Bobeck and Ebba Berntsson also had a strong Thursday, taking two wins of three to vault into third, where they sit going into Saturday.

Below them, four boats are tightly bunched and Saturday's conditions – another settled southwesterly is on the cards – could shake things up again. The Italians finished 17th in their discard race on Friday, so their lead isn't bulletproof.

Italy's Ruggero Tita and Caterina Banti came out of retirement in March. Through Monday to Wednesday, you'd never have known they'd been away – three days on top, a 2-2-1 on the opening card, and the kind of muted efficiency that has won them two Olympic golds. "Today is a restart," Tita said on day one. "I'm rediscovering the level of competition."

Then Thursday happened. Their spinnaker pole broke in race two – "we nosedived and just broke the pole – it can happen," Banti said afterwards, poker-faced – and with no time to fix it they had to sit out race three.

On Friday they finished 16th in the opening race, which looked a lot like the end of the dream. But it wasn’t. They recovered with 3-3-1 in the next three races to claw their way back to fourth overall. Ahead of them, compatriots Gianluigi Ugolini and Maria Giubilei lead, with Argentina's Mateo Majdalani and Eugenia Bosco two points behind and the French duo of Tim Mourniac and Aloïse Retornaz third.

It's tight between the top four, and the sight of Tita and Banti fighting their way back into contention makes Saturday one to watch.

Matt Wearn began his week with a black flag. The Australian double Olympic champion, fresh off a Palma title, was apparently too keen to assert himself in race one and paid for it with a DSQ and an overnight in 72nd place. By Wednesday he was back in the lead. By Friday he was out on his own at the top, and there, barring something strange, he'll stay.

Britain's Micky Beckett and Elliot Hanson have chased hard throughout the week. Beckett, whose day-one two-race sweep gave him the early lead, knows this venue intimately. The ten-time Hyères veteran who has sat on the podium here in each of the last five years described the venue as a place "to make weather forecasters look stupid". His GB teammate Elliot Hanson was disqualified in Friday's complicated second race, alongside Wearn himself, but holds third.

The Wearn advantage is significant but the ILCA 7 medal race format, which adds two races directly to accumulated points, means a bad one from Wearn or a brilliant one from the Brits could yet produce a surprise. For now, the Palma champion is the clear frontrunner.

The women's dinghy leaderboard has shifted on an almost daily basis all week. Ireland's Eve McMahon, who arrived carrying momentum from her victory in Palma and recorded a perfect opening day, heads into Saturday's medal race at the top – but only just, with a two-point advantage over USA's Charlotte Rose. McMahon's Friday came down to a second place in a complicated, delayed second race of the day, enough to hold her position and the slender lead.

Rose, who won the SOF title in 2024, recovered from a difficult Friday to stay in touch. The Netherlands' Maxime van de Werken-Jonker – who at one point wore the yellow bib as overall leader – sits further back after a mixed week where she combined fast sailing with the kind of inconsistency that this fleet punishes ruthlessly.

The fleet's compressed scoring means a strong medal race from almost anyone in the top ten could change the picture entirely, and with a westerly building through Saturday afternoon, the conditions will favour whoever can adapt quickest.

Max Maeder is the Formula Kite men's champion at SOF 2026, and it would have taken something extraordinary to prevent that outcome from the moment Thursday's racing finished. The 19-year-old Singaporean had scored perfectly in Thursday's five-race qualifying day – with wins "from the front, the side and the back," as he described it himself – which meant going into Friday's finals series as the overwhelming favourite. He duly delivered, taking the title in the winner-takes-all final.

It is Maeder's second title at this venue, his first having come when he was 15. It follows his victory at Palma earlier this month, making him a back-to-back winner at the opening two Grand Slam events of the season. He attributes his step up to a coaching change ten months ago to France's Matthieu Girolet, which has shifted his focus from raw speed management towards reading the tactical patterns of the race course more deeply.

Italy's Riccardo Pianosi, the SOF 2025 champion, had held the overall lead for the first two days before Maeder took it back on Wednesday, and leaves with silver, while China's Qibin Huang claimed bronze.

Lauriane Nolot's win in the women's Formula Kite final was the local crowd's moment of the week, and she gave them a proper show. The 27-year-old from Toulon, raised on the water here alongside her father and brother, timed her start to the final perfectly and led wire-to-wire, putting enough clear water between herself and the field to win the seven-minute race by close to four seconds. It is her second SOF title, her first having come in 2023, and it follows her win in Palma at the start of the month – meaning she has now won the first two Sailing Grand Slam events of the season.

Nolot arrived in Hyères as the double world champion, having won one of those titles here in 2024, and as the Paris 2024 Olympic silver medallist. She has been the dominant force from day one, absorbing a non-start in one race early in the week without ever really looking in danger of losing the overall lead. Argentina's Catalina Turienzo finished second in the final, having secured herself a finals spot by winning Thursday's final qualifying race when Nolot sat it out. France's Lysa Caval completed an all-but-French podium in bronze.

Grae Morris won the men's iQFOiL in arguably the most dramatic fashion of any of the four windsurfing and kite titles decided on Friday. The Australian Paris 2024 silver medallist was over the line early in the first final race along with China's 2025 SOF champion Kun Bi, starting five seconds late and unable to claw back the deficit. Rather than exhaust himself in the pursuit of a race already lost, he made the pragmatic call to pull out and conserve energy. In the second race, he was in a straight fight with Italy's Nicolo Renna and came out on top to take the title.

Renna had led the overall standings from the opening day, his consistency across wildly varying conditions – five knots and pumping on day one through to 25-knot survival sailing on Wednesday – a testament to his versatility. On the water he was sharp enough to hold his lead through four days but ultimately fell to Morris in the final. Italy's Federico Alan Pilloni, who won the first final race when Morris and Bi were early, took silver; Bi, the defending champion, bronze.

Marta Maggetti's final was neither clean nor simple. The 30-year-old Italian Olympic champion came into Friday's winner-takes-all with the Palma monkey still on her back – Israel's Tamar Steinberg had beaten her to that title four weeks earlier – and with Steinberg once again on top of the overall leaderboard after dominating from day one. The Israeli SOF 2024 and 2025 champion had won three of Wednesday's four races, and led into Friday with a one-point margin into the final.

Then Maggetti flipped it. The final was, by her own admission, "a crazy one" – she gave Steinberg a penalty in the decisive race ("you want to push in the last one and it's part of the job") and crossed the line ahead.

Steinberg could only manage fourth in the final, but with her point lead from the semi-final stage, she took silver anyway. China's Zheng Yan beat New Zealand's Stella Bilger in a separate battle for bronze.

Full standings here.