Partners

The 49er, 49erFX and Nacra 17 are three of the ten sailing events at the Olympic Games — and the pathway that most of the world’s best professional sailors came through. We are looking for partners to join us on the road to Los Angeles 2028.

Why these classes

This is where the stars come from

We audited the 2026 SailGP grid sailor by sailor. Of the 78 athletes racing this season, 50 have raced the 49er, 49erFX or Nacra 17 — roughly two in three, and a clear majority of the drivers. At the Canada Sail Grand Prix in Halifax in June 2026, all three drivers on the podium were 49er graduates: Diego Botín, Nathan Outteridge and Sébastien Schneiter.

Botín and Florian Trittel won 49er Olympic gold in Marseille and the SailGP championship nineteen days apart. That is not a coincidence. It is what a development pathway looks like when it works.

And they come back

This is not a one-way door, and it is not history. Diego Botín and Florian Trittel won the 2025 49er World Championship in Cagliari — a year after Paris gold, on two months of specific training, while racing SailGP. They have said they will return to the 49er after the 2027 America’s Cup, with Los Angeles in view.

Two crews are racing our fleets right now with both sailors on the SailGP grid. Sébastien Schneiter and Arno de Planta (CH 77) finished 8th at the 2026 European Championship in a 93-boat fleet and 18th at the Worlds. Joan Cardona — Finn bronze medallist at Tokyo — and Nicole van der Velden are campaigning the Nacra 17 for LA28, 15th at the 2026 Worlds in Quiberon.

And the 2025 World Championship in Cagliari drew a whole cohort back. Martine Grael and Kahena Kunze — double Olympic champions, and Grael now the first female driver in SailGP — returned after a post-Paris break and posted the best single-day score in the 49erFX fleet. Jonas Warrer, the 2008 gold medallist, came back. So did Vilma Bobeck, Paris silver, and Jena Seaton, racing for the first time since her Rio bronze, after two children and a spell coaching.

A partner reaching these fleets is not buying access to tomorrow’s stars. It is buying access to today’s, in the boats they keep coming back to.

We are the only Olympic class that can sell the sail

Following a class rule change approved by the World Council, the class association holds the right to market the advertising space on the jib of the 49er, 49erFX and Nacra 17. No other Olympic sailing class has this. It means a partner’s mark can appear on every boat in the fleet, on the water, in every photograph and every broadcast frame of a championship — not on a banner beside the course.

Branding plans are issued 28 days before the first day of measurement, and the policy protects existing sailor, team, event and national-authority sponsors from clashes. The full terms are on our Jib Advertising Policy page.

Every boat is a data source

Our fleets race with an electronic starting system that records every boat, every start, every second. That gives us something Olympic sailing has never had: a real performance dataset across a whole fleet. We are building competitions on top of it — best starter, top speed, most places gained — the sailing equivalent of cycling’s sprint and mountains classifications, each one available for a partner to own across a season.

The road to Los Angeles

Our championship calendar runs unbroken from Palma in spring 2027 to the Olympic regatta at the Port of Los Angeles.

Event	Venue	When
Trofeo Princesa Sofía	Palma, Mallorca	March–April 2027
World Sailing Championships	Gdynia, Poland	2027
European Championship	Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands	November 2027
World Championship	Tangier, Morocco	January–February 2028
Olympic Games	Port of Los Angeles	23–28 July 2028

What a partnership includes

On the water

• Jib branding across the fleet — unique to these classes among Olympic sailing
• Championship and regatta naming rights, subject to host agreement
• Course, start-line and boat-park branding at our events

Broadcast and digital

• Presenting rights on our live race coverage and tracker — the most advanced live product in Olympic-class sailing
• 49er.org and nacra17.org, which take around 300,000 visits in a championship week
• Our sailor and supporter mailing lists, segmentable by class, country and role
• A fourteen-year video archive of today’s professional stars as juniors and Olympians

Competitions and content

• Named classifications built on live fleet data — best starter, top speed, most places gained
• Season-long standings, a fantasy league, and the content that comes with them

At the venue

• On-water hospitality — viewing boats alongside the racing, run next to a client conference or company retreat
• Our Get On The Water activation, giving the public a chance to try sailing, winging and paddleboarding at our championships
• Access to the sailors, the coaches and the boats

Supplier partnerships

• Official supplier status in your category, with the whole fleet as your proving ground
• Product trials and technical feedback from the best skiff and multihull sailors in the world

Partnerships run from a single-event digital package to a class title through the Olympic Games. Season packages start at €1,000.

Brands who have worked with us

Seiko titled our European and World Championships and ran a sailor development programme with the class. SAP built our first live analytics platform. Magic Marine and Forward WIP have been official clothing partners of the Olympic skiff and multihull classes; adidas Sailing, Spinnaker Watches, Kingfisher Yacht Ropes and Hyundai New Zealand have all partnered with the classes or our championships. North Sails is our official sailmaker, and our boats are built by Ovington, Mackay and Nacra Sailing International.