Naples Was Won by 49er and Nacra 17 Sailors

Luna Rossa won the second Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup Preliminary Regatta on the Bay of Naples, 25 to 27 September. The Italians topped the fleet racing on 71 points, 15 clear of Emirates Team New Zealand, then beat the Kiwis by 17 seconds in the match race final. La Roche-Posay Racing Team finished third. Emirates Team New Zealand’s Women & Youth crew won that division.

Ten of the twelve sailors on the top three boats came through the 49er or the Nacra 17. Two of them, Gianluigi Ugolini and Maria Giubilei, won the Nacra 17 World Championship in May. They trimmed the winning boat.

Freddie Carr and Mozzy review the Naples regatta for The Foil. The Luna Rossa trimming discussion starts at 13:25.

Biggest difference maker: Burling and Giubilei

Luna Rossa won four of the eight fleet races. Add the three practice races on Thursday and the senior boat won seven of eleven.

Peter Burling and Marco Gradoni steered. Gianluigi Ugolini and Maria Giubilei trimmed.

Freddie Carr raced aboard Britannia as a cyclor at the last Cup. He judges a helm and trimmer by one thing, the traveller. Carr, on The Foil Debrief:

“The relationship that stood out to me was between Burling and Giubilei. Coming from my cyclor background, all I do is watch the traveller. When you see the traveller movement completely under control without over-corrections, and you see them bearing away at the top mark and rounding up at the leeward mark and the roll of the boat being close to perfect, that’s what I saw with Giubilei and Burling this weekend. Whenever they got to the top and turned left, Luna Rossa just looked silky smooth. You’ve got to take your hats off to her, because she straight up looked like one of the best sail trimmers in the fleet this weekend.”

Mozzy, alongside him, named the trap they avoided. Put a separate mainsheet trimmer in a fast boat and the helm and trimmer start chasing each other, each overcorrecting for the other. Giubilei’s traveller took the edge off each gust. Burling steered through the rest.

Giubilei has spent a decade managing gust response on a foiling catamaran in Olympic fleets. Naples showed it.

Biggest bridge: Olympic sailing to the pro circuit

The 49er and the Nacra 17 are where Olympic sailors learn to race boats that go faster than the wind. The America’s Cup and SailGP hire from them for that reason.

Look at the helms in Naples. Burling won 49er gold in Rio and drives New Zealand in SailGP. Dylan Fletcher won 49er gold in Tokyo and the 2025 SailGP title, and now skippers GB1. Diego Botín won 49er gold in Marseille and drives Spain in SailGP. Quentin Delapierre raced the Nacra 17 at Tokyo and drove France’s F50 within two months of the closing ceremony.

The skills transfer directly. A 49er crew lives on apparent wind, with the breeze always forward and every manoeuvre costing boat lengths. A Nacra 17 crew adds the foils: ride height, power on and off, a splashdown for every error. An AC40 asks for all of it at 40 knots.

Five years ago the pathway ran from the Olympics to the Cup in a straight line, one campaign at a time. Now sailors run both at once. Ugolini and Giubilei won the Nacra 17 Worlds in May and trimmed the winning AC40 in September.

Biggest bridge for women: the Nacra 17

The Nacra 17 is the only double-handed foiling boat on the Olympic programme, and it carries a woman in every crew. It has done so since 2016.

Ten years on, that has produced a generation of women with a decade of racing foiling catamarans at the front of a world-class fleet. No other pathway in the sport can claim that.

Naples showed the result. Giubilei trimmed the senior boat that won. Erica Dawson, Paris 2024 bronze medallist, won the Women & Youth division with Emirates Team New Zealand. Margherita Porro skippered Luna Rossa 2. The 49erFX supplied two more, Ellie Aldridge and Maria Vittoria Marchesini.

At the pre-regatta press conference, Luna Rossa made a point of it. The senior AC40 crew carries no gender quota. Giubilei sails it on ability, with Worlds silver from 2021 and 2025 and gold from 2026.

The Cup teams do not need a quota to find women who can sail these boats. They need a Nacra 17 results sheet.

Best boat recipe: the top three

The top three teams in Naples built their AC40 crews from the same two Olympic classes.

Ten of the twelve. Outteridge and Trittel raced both classes at Olympic level.

The 49er gave these boats their helms: Burling, Outteridge and Botín. The Nacra 17 gave Luna Rossa and the French most of their trimmers. Delapierre, the French skipper, is the one helm who came straight from the cat.

Biggest number: nine out of nine

Every AC40 in Naples carried at least one sailor from the 49er or the Nacra 17. Twenty-one of the 36 sailors came through one class or the other.

Fifteen raced the 49er or 49erFX. On the senior boats: Burling, Outteridge, Jensen, Menzies, Botín and Trittel; Dylan Fletcher (Tokyo gold) and Andrea Tesei on GB1; Pietro Sibello (Beijing bronze) on Tudor Team Alinghi; Hans Henken (Paris bronze) and Harry Melges IV on ARC Team USA. On the Women & Youth boats: Ellie Aldridge, a 49erFX sailor before her kite gold, and Sam Webb on Athena Pathway; Maria Vittoria Marchesini (49erFX) and Giovanni Santi on Luna Rossa 2.

Eight raced the Nacra 17: Ugolini, Giubilei, Outteridge, Delapierre, Saunders, Trittel, Margherita Porro (skipper of Luna Rossa 2) and Erica Dawson (Paris bronze, Emirates Team New Zealand Women & Youth).

Outteridge and Trittel raced both. The other fifteen sailors came from the Optimist, Laser, Finn, 470, Moth, windfoil, kite and match racing.

Best convert: Quentin Delapierre

Delapierre learned to sail catamarans at Cataschool in Larmor-Baden, on the Gulf of Morbihan. He won the Tour de France à la Voile twice in the Diam 24.

In late 2018 his sponsor offered him a Multi50 offshore programme. He turned it down for a Nacra 17 campaign with Manon Audinet. At the time he said the boat was hard, and that he was working to reach Audinet’s level.

Inside three years he had a European silver, a World Cup win and eighth place at Tokyo 2020. SailGP handed him the France F50 in September 2021, replacing Billy Besson. He skippered France’s AC75 in Barcelona and now skippers La Roche-Posay.

In Naples his boat won two fleet races, survived two capsizes and finished third.

Best second act: the French

Mozzy rated La Roche-Posay close to the second-best boat on performance, ahead of the Kiwis on raw sailing despite the capsizes and a false start. He put it down to the trimmer and helm partnerships on each side of the boat, among the longest-standing in the sport.

Botín and Trittel won 49er gold together in Marseille. They do not need to learn each other.

Best division result

Emirates Team New Zealand’s Women & Youth crew, Jake Pye, Erica Dawson, Serena Woodall and Josh Armit, won the division. They finished ahead of Margherita Porro’s Luna Rossa 2 in the final fleet race to take it.

Dawson won Nacra 17 bronze in Marseille. Porro, on the boat they beat, is a Nacra 17 sailor too.

Best reserve: Ruggero Tita

Ruggero Tita, double Olympic Nacra 17 champion and four-time world champion, sat out Naples as Luna Rossa’s reserve. He remains one of the team’s senior sailors.

Mozzy noted that the winning crew was close to Luna Rossa’s Women & Youth line-up from Barcelona, with Burling in for Porro. That leaves Max Sirena with a selection problem most team principals would pay for.

One Italian team holds the last two Olympic Nacra 17 titles, the current world title and a 49er Olympic champion.

Best ending

In May, Ugolini and Giubilei stood on top of a Nacra 17 podium in Quiberon.

In September they stood on Luna Rossa’s, in front of tens of thousands on the Lungomare Caracciolo.

The Cup itself comes to the same water next year.

The numbers

Eight fleet races, then the match race final. Nine AC40s from six teams.

Sources

• The Foil Debrief: Naples review with Freddie Carr and Mozzy
• Luna Rossa team report, final day (Sail-World)
• America’s Cup Media overall report (Sail-World)
• NZ Herald: points and race wins
• Crew lists (Scuttlebutt)
• Women & Youth result (The Triton)
• Press conference on Giubilei and the quota (Giornale della Vela)
• Delapierre: SailGP driver announcement, 2021; start of his Nacra 17 campaign (Course au Large); La Roche-Posay crew (Sailing World)
• 2026 Nacra 17 World Championship
• Our coverage: Gimson and Burnet snag 2025 Worlds from the Italians; Stars from the 49er and Nacra 17 take to the America’s Cup stage (2024)