Luca Rizzotti bought a Moth in 2007 and accidentally started a movement

When we launched The Foil at the start of this year, it was understandable that quite a few people incorrectly jumped to the conclusion that it must be a Luca Rizzotti project. After all, this passionate Italian has become synonymous with foiling and the whole world around it.

Rizzotti is the founder of the Foiling Organization, founder and president at the Foiling Week and WeAreFoiling, AC40 Class Manager, and a vice president of the International Moth class.

Such is his influence in this cutting edge part of the sport, he even finds himself negotiating health & safety regulations with civil servants and politicians at the European Union in Brussels. It’s all a far cry from his first encounter with the wonderful world of foiling.

“I was living in Sydney back in 2007, sailing in 18ft skiffs, and [Australian sailor] Scott Babbage was also in the 18s, but he had a foiling Moth too. Long story short, when I was going back to live in Italy I decided to buy his Moth and bring it back with me. It was the first foiling Moth on Lake Garda, and probably all of Italy, although I’m not sure. But certainly I was one of the early ones so of course I wanted to help with getting more Moths on the water in Italy.”

Rizzotti soon got involved with the Italian class association and then became president, during which time he brought the Moth fleet to Lake Garda to hold the World Championship in 2012. Then in 2013, at the end of the America’s Cup in San Francisco - where the world had just witnessed 72ft foiling catamarans flying around the Bay - a lightbulb went off in Rizzotti’s head. “Well, if catamarans of 72 feet are foiling in San Francisco and we are here foiling with 11-foot Moths, we must be able to connect these dots, right?

“This had to happen. So, what could we do to help this succeed? We were not really event organisers, so we had a blank sheet of paper. We thought if you want to help a new branch of sailing or a new industry grow, you organise racing.” So Foiling Week was born, a fledgling idea that first took place in 2014 and has turned into an annual behemoth on Lake Garda.

“A lot of people who were fans of foiling were all in email contact with each other, sort of ‘pen friends’, but they had never met in person. I remember Andrew McDougall, of Mach 2 and Waszp fame, met with Tom Speer, who was the wing designer of the big Oracle trimaran. They had been exchanging ideas for a long time but had never met in person. We became the hub of this, and it just grew with Foiling Week. The first event in 2014 was made of, I would say, 60 to 80 boats, and now we are in the range of 500 entries for Foiling Week. It is incredible.”

Most sailing events would be very happy with those first year figures, let alone the multi-hundred numbers now. Rizzotti had clearly struck oil. There was a pent-up demand for foiling enthusiasts around the world all to club together and share this pioneering adventure of rapid technical development and high-speed sailing. “We gave the community a home to come back to every year,” he says. “I would say even the whole town of Malcesine and Lake Garda eventually benefited from that. Although at the beginning, I remember the yacht club in year one basically told us, ‘Do not do this crazy thing again.’ They had a lot of doubts.

“For a normal yacht club that was running Olympic classes and traditional regattas, this bunch of new boats - all foiling, most of them garage-built back then, with the characters that go together with garage-building - was a unique demographic. They were like-minded, passionate people, but they stood out from the normal sailing demographic you would expect in a yacht club. Especially back then. So the club asked, ‘Do you really want to do this again?’ and we went, ‘Yeah, let's give it one more try.’” ‘One more try’ has now turned into an annual event that just continues to grow in size and gather momentum.

While Malcesine on Lake Garda has become the consistent annual focal point, other editions of the Foiling Week have popped around the world including in Sydney and Pensacola in Florida, the same place that was recently announced as American Magic’s training base for the SailGP league.

The Foiling Awards in Genoa, north Italy, have just completed their ninth edition and along with that goes the Foiling Congress. “The awards are like the Oscars; they are a prize for everything that happened in the previous year. We brought in the Congress to make it more worthwhile for people travelling from everywhere around the globe. Instead of coming for just one evening, we gave them a reason to come beyond the gala dinner.

“It is a great opportunity to discuss ideas and for networking, but we have a lot of practical topics. At the moment, one of the key bottlenecks for the growth of foiling is that according to European law, foiling is not permitted for recreational crafts. It’s not that it is strictly forbidden, but instead of being allowed to use a CE mark, which is the easy way, you need to rate every vessel yourself. This means extra cost for the manufacturer and extra cost for the customer in insurance. We are trying to work with the European Commission to make foiling allowed in four years' time, which is when they update the law.”

So does that mean that every time a Moth sailor goes out on Lake Garda or somewhere in Europe, they’re breaking the law? Fortunately not, according to Rizzotti. “To be clear, this is only for recreational crafts. Sports dinghies and sailing boards are under World Sailing certification, which is a different system that allows those boats to go sailing with no problem. But for full flying, where the hulls are clear of the water, you would need CE marking, which at the moment is impossible to get. I am discussing with people in Brussels how to change the law in Europe.”

Rizzotti can’t quite believe how he spends his days. From that initial purchase of a second Moth from his Aussie mate Scott Babbage almost 20 years ago, now the passionate Italian is working at every level to promote foiling, from the fun stuff at Lake Garda to wading through the red tape and administrative minefield of Brussels. “It has been a learning experience; I come from organising events and now I am a lobbyist,” he half-laughs.

Not that he’s complaining. Four years ago, from running the Foiling Organization part time while holding down a job with Italian boatbuilder Persico, now Rizzotti is full time. “I am grateful for the opportunity because, while it is work, it is passion. This idea of foiling can bring so much to the sport and the industry - extra comfort [due to a smoother ride above the waves], reduced emissions, and bringing technology into a world that has been very conservative for a long time... it is a breath of fresh air.”