Quentin Delapierre: Playing the long game

Almost every move Quentin Delapierre has made has been the right one. He has chosen his disciplines well, picked the correct boats at the correct moments, turned down the wrong opportunities and said yes to the ones that mattered. He has built, methodically and over more than a decade, exactly the career he set out to build. Everything has gone to plan – bar the payoff.

Delapierre was born in Vannes in July 1992 and grew up on the Gulf of Morbihan, the son of champion windsurfer Jean-Philippe Delapierre. He learned to sail at the Cataschool in nearby Larmor-Baden, and as a teenager he was good enough at fencing that he could easily have gone the other way. He chose sailing instead. The reasoning – that no two races are ever the same – would come to define the 33-year-old’s career.

The results came quickly. He won the European J/80 title in 2014 at the age of 22, then made his name on the Tour de France à la Voile, taking the Diam 24 trimaran circuit in 2016 – where he won 10 of 17 races and clinched the overall title by 26 points – then again in 2018.

After his second Tour de France win, Delapierre was offered the thing many French sailors chase for a lifetime: a fully backed Multi50 ocean-racing programme, boat, yard and designer all in place. He turned it down. The romance of offshore racing – something close to a national faith in France – would have to wait, because it had never really been the dream.

What he wanted was the America's Cup, and he had mapped the route there through Olympic sailing and SailGP, well away from the offshore world. So he teamed up with Manon Audinet for a late run at Olympic selection in the mixed Nacra 17, and the pair won the French spot ahead of the established crew of four-time world champion Billy Besson. They took gold at the 2019 World Cup regatta in Enoshima, silver at the 2020 European Championship behind the untouchable Ruggero Tita and Caterina Banti, and finished eighth at the Tokyo Games. The two are still crewmates, with Audinet now the strategist aboard Delapierre's boat in SailGP.

Handed the France SailGP wheel midway through season two as Besson's replacement – the very sailor he'd edged out for the Olympic spot – he needed just shy of a year to turn it into silverware. At his home Grand Prix in Saint-Tropez in September 2022 he pushed the French F50 to 99.94 km/h (about 54 knots), to set what was then SailGP's outright speed record. Two weeks later, at Cádiz, he sealed France's first event win, roughly a year to the month after taking over. Another event win in Sydney followed in early 2023. By then Delapierre had built a reputation as one of the circuit’s most dangerous starters, and a real threat whenever the wind got up.

And yet France have never made a SailGP season Grand Final. Fourth, then seventh, then fifth, they have circled it over the last three seasons without ever breaking through, and the toughest moment was probably San Francisco in July 2024. Delapierre's flying starts had carried France to the top of the leaderboard after day one of the season four finale, a single point clear and projected into the winner-takes-all final alongside Australia and New Zealand. Then, chasing a place in that final, he misjudged a late tack at the weather mark and collided with Rockwool Denmark, snapping his boat's rudder. The damage and a 12-point penalty ended the weekend on the spot, and from the sidelines he watched Diego Botín's Spain take the third final berth and go on to beat the two heavyweights for the championship.

His knack for taking a blow and coming back showed a year on at Sassnitz, at the first German Sail Grand Prix. In Friday practice his F50 nosedived at speed after the starboard rudder broke off, sending Delapierre to hospital for checks while the shore team rebuilt the boat overnight. Cleared to race, he came back the next day and went on to win the whole event, holding off Australia and Great Britain in a shifting Baltic breeze. Resilience, clearly, is not the missing ingredient.

All the while, one prize has stayed fixed in his sights – the America's Cup, and the chance to win it for France. Appointed skipper and helmsman of the French Orient Express challenge in 2023, he led the least experienced team in the fleet at the 37th Cup in Barcelona. France’s AC75 didn't fly until June 2024, only a couple of months before racing, and from there the team were forever chasing the clock – routinely first off the dock and last back in, sometimes after dark. They ultimately placed last among the challengers, well short of the Louis Vuitton Cup semi-finals.

The momentum from that campaign has carried over for a more serious crack at the 38th America's Cup. K-Challenge kept its core together after Barcelona, rebranded as La Roche-Posay Racing Team, with two-time Cup winner Philippe Presti as sporting director and Delapierre confirmed as skipper. The big name beside him is Botín – the rival who inherited France's place at that San Francisco finale – sharing helming duties. Training out of Lorient before shifting to Italy for the 2027 Cup, K-Challenge is the only syndicate blending its Cup and SailGP campaigns this closely, with overlapping crews, one talent pool, and an academy developing the next generation of youth and women sailors. Presti's brief is a pointed one: sharpen the tactician in Delapierre, the part of his game he had let slide, and make the boat as lethal after the start as it already is off it.

So here Quentin Delapierre is – fast, admired, clear-eyed, and pointed at two prizes that have so far refused to come. France, pretty much peerless in the offshore world, still waits for a SailGP crown and the Auld Mug, and Delapierre has spent his whole career deciding, very deliberately, that he is the man to deliver both. The groundwork was laid long ago. The only thing missing is the finish.