The Foil Weekly Wrap - 1 June ‘26

It's been a week of firsts, finales and a fair bit of frustration – Gitana 18 finally airborne, fresh champions crowned off Sorrento and Marseille, and SailGP staring down a logistical mess on both sides of the Atlantic. Let's get into it.

She's airborne. A little later than the team would have liked, but the new Gitana 18 – the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild – got off the water for the first time last Monday, just over three months after her February launch. The 32-metre, 19-tonne giant had been waiting on the most talked-about part of the whole project: a Y-shaped pendulum foil borrowed in spirit from America's Cup monohulls, spanning more than ten metres tip to tip.

Once the starboard appendage was finally bolted on, it took the crew less than half an hour off Belle-Île to find the right mode and settle into stable flight – a process that swallowed the best part of two years with her predecessor, Gitana 17. Conditions were hardly textbook either, just 10 to 13 knots, which makes this early flight all the more promising. The port foil should arrive within the fortnight, leaving Charles Caudrelier roughly five months to get properly acquainted before he defends his Ultim title on the Route du Rhum in November.

A week of feather-light breeze and brain-aching tactics in the Gulf of Naples produced four new European champions, with the 2026 IMA Maxi European Championship wrapping up off Sorrento as part of Tre Golfi Sailing Week.

In the headline Maxi Grand Prix / Maxi 72 fleet, Peter Harrison's Jolt – with The Foil's own Freddie Carr aboard – held off Jethou and Bella Mente to take the title in a class so tight that four boats were separated by a single point going into the final race.

Newly-announced America’s Cup challenger Karel Komarek's V claimed Maxi 1, alongside American heavyweight Ken Read and Olympic gold medallist Šime Fantela, edging out Leopard 3.

In Maxi 3, Guido Paolo Gamucci's Cippa Lippa X finally landed a title he'd been chasing for three years, while Vincenzo Addessi's Fra Diavolo took the combined Maxi 4 and 5 honours with a crew that's largely sailed together for a decade or more. Full results here.

Over in Marseille, the J/70 Corinthian World Championship – strictly for amateur crews – wrapped up on Saturday with Alec Cutler's Hedgehog successfully defending its crown, and doing so by a comfortable ten points.

The Bermudan boat is sailed by a group of former US Naval Academy crewmates who've been racing together for decades, and that shared shorthand showed across a typically fickle Marseille week: long waits ashore under postponement, then sharp, consistent scoring once the seabreeze filled in.

Australia's Sam Haynes took second on Celestial, with Estonia's Tõnu Tõniste third. Cutler reckons being the oldest crew in the fleet by average age is less a handicap than a quiet advantage – more patience, fewer panics – which is about as Corinthian a philosophy as you'll find. Back-to-back world titles suggest he's onto something. Full results here.

Porto Cervo hosted the Giorgio Armani Superyacht Regatta from Wednesday to Saturday, the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda's annual gathering of the genuinely enormous – seventeen superyachts trading tacks in the La Maddalena channel in a gentle 7 to 12 knots.

Juan Ball's Swan 115 Moat made it three Blue class wins on the bounce, while Carlo Pirzio Biroli's SW 96 Liberty Squared, with veteran Bouwe Bekking calling tactics, took the White class. Both now have their names engraved on the Silver Jubilee Cup. It's not the most cut-throat racing on the calendar, though seeing yachts on this scale manoeuvre so close together is a sight worth turning up for. Full results here.

SailGP, meanwhile, has a season finale it can't yet set in stone. With the conflict in the Middle East rumbling on and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, the league's two closing events – pencilled in for the UAE in November – are in limbo, and shipping a hundred-plus containers of kit through a compromised corridor isn't a job you leave to the last minute. COO Julien di Biase acknowledges nobody has a crystal ball, even as partners on the ground stay cautiously hopeful. The call on a Plan B needs to come in the next few weeks.

Then there's New York, where the obstacle was rather more tangible – and 345 metres long. The Queen Mary 2 on Friday parked across the Hudson and blocked the craning of all 12 F50s into the water, wiping out Friday's practice day entirely. Throw in the continued craning issues on Saturday, followed by a three-boat shunt on Sunday involving the USA, Italy and Brazil, and the logistical issues keep stacking up for SailGP. All this just as the Black Foils are poised to rejoin in Halifax aboard their brand-new F50, and the question stands: are we ever actually going to see a full fleet on the start line?

The Sardinia Cup returns to Porto Cervo after a 14-year absence, running from 31 May to 7 June with a practice race today and racing proper from tomorrow. It's the Mediterranean counterpart to the Admiral's Cup: ten teams, each made up of two boats.

Freddie Carr has written a piece on why this old-school team event matters and why its revival is one to get excited about – well worth a read before the action gets going. Read it here.

Nine solo skippers leave Les Sables d'Olonne on Sunday 7 June for the Vendée Arctique, the first qualifying race for the 2028 Vendée Globe. The twist this year is that there's no fixed course: skippers have to cross the Arctic Circle at a longitude of their own choosing before turning for home, which opens the tactics right up.

Unlike the Vendée Globe, where sailors follow the Southern Ocean's low-pressure systems, here they'll be crossing weather systems, with an ice exclusion zone off Greenland and biodiversity protection areas to navigate around. The IMOCA fleet includes Sam Goodchild, Ambrogio Beccaria, Francesca Clapcich, Violette Dorange and MACSF's Corentin Horeau. These foiling 60-footers can hit 40 knots downwind, so things will happen quickly.

The final leg of La Solitaire du Figaro Paprec is now underway, the 36-boat fleet having set off from Pornichet after a postponement, bound for Le Havre. Stage two went to Paul Loiseau on Région Bretagne - CMB Espoir – a notable result from a sailor on his first Solitaire – ahead of Nicolas Lunven (PRB) and Alexis Thomas (Wings of The Ocean).

The overall standings are tight: Ireland's Tom Dolan, on Kingspan, still leads, but by just three minutes and 38 seconds from Lunven, with Thomas third and Loiseau the next man up, just off the podium. The forecast points to faster reaching conditions later in the leg, so those small gaps at the top could yet stretch. Track the fleet here.

The SSL Gold Cup's Road to Rio heads to Grandson, Switzerland, on Tuesday, with the Africa and Oceania qualifier running from 2 to 4 June on Lake Neuchâtel. Two places at this year's SSL Gold Cup Brasil finals in Rio are on offer. South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have already qualified through their national rankings, leaving newcomers Mozambique, Morocco and the Seychelles to take on Tahiti – the Teva Plichart-led team that became a fan favourite and upset several established nations back in 2023. The event has kept growing, with 66 nations now involved, up from 56 four years ago. The European qualifiers follow from 8 June.

There's more Olympic-class action this week at Dutch Water Week in Almere, which got going today and runs to 7 June on the IJmeer. The third of five Sailing Grand Slam events, it brings the 10 Olympic classes to a purpose-built city-centre course, with the world's best chasing ranking points. Check the current rankings here.

And finally, Saturday 6 June brings the Ronde om Texel, billed as the world's largest catamaran race, with around 300 cats setting off to lap the North Holland island as fast as they can. The mass start off Paal 17, hundreds of boats hitting the water at once, is the spectacle people come for.