SailGP
SailGP - USA snatches win in Valencia Final. Italy win three races to win Group.
Light winds held the trump card on the Final day of racing in Spain Sail Grand Prix, Valencia.
The start of racing was delayed by 25 minutes in what should have been two more qualifying races, as race managers waited for the breeze to settle and freshen. It did neither, peaking at 7.5kts, and often less, resulting in each Group only sailing one race of just four legs, including the sprint off the start and a short reach to the finish.
The shortened series meant that fancied teams who had got themselves buried in the mid-range or worse on the overnight leaderboard had little chance to recover and make the Final.
Once again, light winds and marginal foiling conditions played into the hands of the match racers, with the two top practitioners, Phil Robertson (Red Bull Italy) and Taylor Canfield (SailGP USA), topping their Group scores, and looked set to go head-to-head in the Final.
However, Robertson was too early for the start of the Final and had to drop back to complete his penalty.
He fought back to make contact with the two leaders, Tom Slingsby (Bonds Flying Roos) and Taylor Canfield (USA), who swapped the lead going up the fourth leg of the Final. The final play came just short of the top mark as Canfield returned Slingsby’s play to the same place on the third leg.
This time it was Canfield who came in foiling on starboard tack, picked his moment to tack for the mark, just ahead of Slingsby on port and made the final mark with just enough lead to be able to defend on the reach to the finish line, with the Australian team crossing 11 seconds after the USA.
The Bonds Flying Roos finished just 5 seconds ahead of a fast-finishing Italian team. Rockwool Denmark was missing in action, unable to lock into the same zephyric breeze which occasionally flicked into foiling pressure.
In only Group Race of the day, Rockwool Denmark scrambled into fourth place – sufficient to get them onto equal points and then force the tiebreak against Los Gallos who led Group A after winning two races and finished second in the other. However, they were masters of their own demise in the only Group race sailed on Day 2, recording 6th and last place.
Time for a rethink
After the high octane sailing of Sassnitz, teams will be undergoing introspection as to their light-air performance, with the League shifting to Geneva for Round 11, in less than a fortnight, and then Dubai followed by Abu Dhabi at the end of November. All three are expected to be light-weather venues, and there is $2million in prize money for the winner of the Grand Final in Abu Dhabi.
As we have seen several times this season when the light airs click in, the match racers come to the fore.
This was again demonstrated in the closing stanzas of the Final in Valencia, where Taylor Canfield made the difficult call to sail high in displacement mode and head for the next mark, rather than cracking off and sailing across the course hoping to build sufficient speed to get foiling. The race statistics underlined the merit of the US call with Bonds Flying Roos topping the flight time percentage at 81.5%, but they could only manage second, and the tortoise beat the hare.
Fans were deprived of a great head-to-head battle between two former world match racing champions in the Final, however, a trigger-happy Italian crew misjudged the line approach and were recalled. However skipper Phil Robertson and friends threaded their way through the shifts approaching the final to round in contact with the Australian team, but had insufficient runway left on the final leg, to be able to relegate the Flying Roos to third place.
USA were the most consistent team in Group racing, and were the only team to finish in the top three in every race.
Speaking of their Final race win, Taylor Canfield (USA) remarked: “We knew we had what it took yesterday, and we came in today with a good plan and went out and executed. The pressure was on to make some moves in the final, and we did a great job handling the tactics. Everyone on board was spot-on, we’re pumped.”
“I’d say we’re more of an all-around team now, but we love these conditions,” he said of the team’s prowess in the light. “We feel very comfortable throwing the boat around and we’re confident in our decisions. We’re going to have a lot more of these conditions coming up. We’re ready for them.”
“It’s just about day by day still. We’ve got to keep getting better and stick to our process.”
Match racing skills aside, Anna Weis is one of the USA team’s secret weapons. She’s a specialist grinder, which makes crew configuration decisions a lot more straightforward – when the crew reductions click in, and a choice has to be made in the trade-off between grinder power, and gender composition rules.
“After yesterday, I feel like the team sailed really solidly,” Weiss explained. “There are a few things that we needed to clean up because this fleet is so good. And so you have to do everything and make no mistakes to really be at the top.”
“We worked really hard overnight to focus on a few things and we came out swinging today. And we’re really happy to take the win here in Valencia.”
Los Gallos stumbles on Day 2
Local team Los Gallos, led by 2024 Olympic Gold medalist Diego Botin (ESP), led their Group and should have been a certainty to make the Final, given their 4pt margin over USA who were in third place on the overnight leaderboard.
He, along with a grandstand full of hometown fans, was disappointed at how the final day panned out: “We were expecting a bit more breeze today here in Valencia, but it didn’t turn on. Because of that, the race committee decided to do only one race before the final, which in hindsight was favoring us because we had a very healthy lead before that race.”
“But we didn’t execute a good start. We didn’t manage to get into the front row and started behind. From there, we tried to make a couple of moves to pass some boats and, in the last half-wind, we needed to pass a boat to get just behind the Danes.
“We made a move trying to foil and we couldn’t, and we lost a lot of chances there. So yeah, a bit disappointed. Obviously, we wanted to win the final here in Valencia, especially after the great day we had yesterday. But we need to take the learnings and move forward.”
A very happy Anna Weis (USA) – Day 2 – Spain Sail Grand Prix – Valencia – September 6, 2026 © Ricardo Pinto/SailGP
“We just had a bad race,” he said of finishing last in Race 4 of their Group. “The Danes and the Americans deserve to pass into the Final and we need to take the learnings. As I said, we need to use this hard moment to really dig deep and keep moving forward, especially in these light-air conditions.”
Italy’s best yet
Red Bull Italy enjoyed the team’s best-ever weekend.
“This is for sure the best weekend that this team’s had,” said skipper Phil Robertson after the final. “We finished P3 and won three out of the four races in our group, which is quite a tough ask. We’ve been starting really, really well off the line, but in that final we broke the start line 0.2 seconds early and just ran out of a bit of space at that boat end.
“We fought super hard and got back into that race and even had a shot at the win right at the end. I’m really proud of the team. It’s been a lot of hard work over the last few months. It’s felt like there’s been a lot of progress and we’re taking big steps forward and closing the gap to the top teams. The results weren’t coming, but now this is sort of validation that, yeah, we are making the right moves and doing the right thing.”
On the team’s three fleet race wins: “A big focus for us from the last event to this one was starting. We put a lot of time and effort into it, looking at how we’re going to execute the start and get off the line in different breeze conditions and configurations, not knowing what we were going to get here in Valencia.
“It was a light-air starting event, which probably plays to my strength a bit. We call it ‘elbows out’ – you fight for your spot, you establish it and you fight hard to keep that spot on the line. We did a really good job of that over the weekend and managed P1 at Mark 1 three times, and that gets converted into a win. Happy days for the team.”
Roos’ learn from poor comms
The Flying Roos Tom Slingsby rued an expensive tactical choice they made in the Final, when leading. “95% of the final was good for us,” he said after the race.
“We had a great start. We did make an error at the bottom of the first upwind going for the foil. We got on the foil, but we ended up fading into some right-hand pressure and the U.S. were able to overtake us. We were able to get them back pretty quickly.”
“And then that last bottom-mark gate decision, in hindsight, I look at it as an “own goal”. We should have taken the left turn there. If the boat behind is laying left turn, you’ve got to take left turn.
“But the left gate hadn’t been very good throughout the day, and we were sort of saying, ‘Do what we’ve been doing all day,’ which was right turn. We’d been making gains all day. I’m frustrated at that one for sure.”
“We just need to look at our comms going into that decision. We’re already debriefing it, and it just felt like we weren’t really discussing the situation properly. It felt like we weren’t giving facts and then opinions. It was more opinions, opinions, and it wasn’t structured enough.”
“I think we just need to look at the comms there, because the way we’re sailing the boat is the best we’ve ever sailed the boat. We’re strong in light winds, we’re strong in heavy winds, we just feel good everywhere.
“It’s just going to come down to sort of between-the-ears stuff, and our comms and communication is a big part of that.”
For all their self-flagellation, the Australians can take some comfort that their second-place points give them a 30-point margin over Artemis Racing, the fourth-placed team on Season Points.
That margin is probably sufficient to enable Slingsby and friends to book a berth in the expected to be four-boat final in Abu Dhabi on November 29th.
Group Racing Points after Day 2 and four races completed:
Group A: USA 15pts; DEN 14pts; ESP 14pts; GER 7pts; CAN 5pts; FRA 5pts
Group B: ITA 15pts; AUS 12pts; GBR 11pts; SUI 8pts; SWE 6 pts; NZL 5pts; BRA 3pts
Final: USA 10pts; AUS 9pts; ITA 8pts; DEN 7pts; ESP 6pts; GBR 5pts; SUI 4pts; GER 3pts; SWE 2pts; CAN 1pt; NZL0pts; FRA 0pts; BRA 0pts
by Richard Gladwell
