Look at Luna Rossa’s boat and Emirates Team New Zealand’s boat. Look at who’s steering them, trimming them, calling the wind. Look at where they came from. Both of the Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup favorites are essentially built from the same source: the 49er and Nacra 17 classes. That’s not a recruiting coincidence. That’s a competitive advantage made visible.
Luna Rossa 1: The Nacra 17 Core
Five of Luna Rossa’s six sailors come directly from the 49er and Nacra 17 pipeline. Ruggero Tita won Olympic gold in Nacra 17 in Tokyo 2021, then won it again in Paris 2024. He trims on Boat 1. Maria Giubilei and Gianluigi Ugolini just won the 2026 Nacra 17 World Championship together. They stepped off the podium weeks ago and straight into the Cup boat. Umberto Molineris is the 49er champion. Peter Burling, the skipper, built his foundation in the 49er before becoming an Olympic champion and three-time Cup winner.
© Sailing Energy / 49er and Nacra Class
That’s not a team built on potential or past glory. Giubilei and Ugolini’s world title is from this year. Tita’s Olympic golds are recent. They’re coming into the Cup with current-form credentials from the classes that demand the most from sailors.
New Zealand: The 49er Dynasty
Emirates Team New Zealand is built on something deeper: a 49er lineage that spans three decades of American’s Cup dominance.
Nathan Outteridge, the skipper, is a 4x 49er World Champion. He won Olympic gold in 2012 and silver in 2016 in the 49er. Blair Tuke is a 6x 49er World Champion with Olympic gold from Rio 2016 in the 49er, plus silvers from London 2012 and Tokyo 2021. Iain Jensen is a 3x 49er World Champion with Olympic medals in 2012 and 2016. These aren’t reserve sailors or coaches. They’re sailing the boat, steering and trimming.
Nathan Outerridge and Iain Jensen (AUS) who won Gold Medal, 08.08.12, in the Medal Race Men’s Skiff (49er) event in The London 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition.
The London 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition runs from 29 July to 12 August and brings together 380 of the world’s best sailors to race on Weymouth Bay.
Then there’s Seb Menzies, the current 49er World Champion (2026) and European Champion. He’s 20. He’s the youngest sailor on the team and the living proof the pipeline still works. New Zealand doesn’t just have past 49er champions—it has the current one.
Erica Dawson brought Nacra 17 credentials, earning bronze at Paris 2024. Lena Sanderson has Nacra 17 podium finishes. Even the coaching staff includes Javier Torres del Moral, who coached Olympic gold medalists Martine Grael and Kahena Kunze in 49er FX.
The Bridge: Seb Menzies
Seb Menzies is the perfect example of how the pipeline works. He’s the 49er World Champion right now. He’s also racing for Emirates Team New Zealand in the AC75. He’s learned to make a 49er go fast in conditions that demand precision, crew work that has to be perfect, and the ability to read wind and speed with ruthless accuracy. That’s exactly what the Cup demands, just in a bigger boat.
When you ask why New Zealand keeps winning Americas Cups, the answer isn’t just money or facilities or history. It’s that they’ve built a system where sailors come up through the 49er, learn the fundamentals of boat speed and crew coordination, and then transition that into larger boats. Seb is that system working in real time. He’s 20 and he’s the 49er World Champion and he’s on an America’s Cup boat.
© Sailing Energy / 49er and Nacra Class
Luna Rossa saw the same thing. They looked at who was fast at the highest level and found sailors coming out of the Nacra 17 class. Tita, Giubilei, Ugolini. All of them shaped by the foiling multihull, where one mistake costs you three boat-lengths and the margin between first and fifth is measured in inches.
Why This Matters
The 49er and Nacra 17 aren’t warm-up classes. They’re not pathways to something else. They’re the nursery where sailors learn to make boats go fast under pressure. Miss a shift in a 49er and you lose places. Get the crew work wrong and you’re slow. There’s nowhere to hide.
That pressure builds sailors who can handle a Cup campaign. Both Luna Rossa and New Zealand understood that. Rather than trying to build sailors from scratch, they looked at the Olympic fleets and said: show us who’s winning at the highest level. That’s who we want.
It’s a simple idea. It also explains why two teams separated by thousands of miles, built by different organizations with different philosophies, ended up with essentially the same recruiting strategy. The talent lives in one place. Both favorites found it.
CEO Max Sirena of Luna Rossa said: “We have top-level sailors alongside young athletes with enormous potential. This mix represents real added value for us.”
He could have been describing New Zealand. He could have been describing any team that looked at who was currently fast at the peak of Olympic sailing and built their Cup campaign around that. The 49er and Nacra 17 are where the speed is. Both Cup favorites figured that out.
The preliminary regatta takes place in Naples September 24–27, 2026. The Challenger Selection Series begins in May 2027, with the America’s Cup Match scheduled for July 10–18 in Naples, Italy. Follow all the action at americascup.com.
