2025 Team Racing World Championship at New York Yacht Club - Day 3
by Michelle Slade 1 Jun 01:39 BST
May 28 - June 1, 2025
2025 Team Racing World Championship © Paul Todd / Outside Images
Sunny skies met big breeze on Day 3 but by 12:30 p.m. racing was postponed, and as the wind built to 25+, the Race Committee abandoned racing at 3:00 p.m. Tension is high among the top contenders for the 2025 Team Racing World Championship; Corinthian Yacht Club (Marblehead, Mass.) leads with 15 points after Day 3 but must meet each of its close rivals on Sunday: Newport Harbor Yacht Club, Baltimore SC, Kiwi Racing and New York Yacht Club.
Winning both of their races today, Great Britain's West Kirby Hawks are just shy of the top 5 with 11 points after 16 races. But they're non-plussed, figuring that the preliminary stages of the event have been a learning period. As skipper Dom Johnson notes, the team has enough battle scars to not sweat losses too heavily. Four of the eight Hawks were part of a world-championship-winning team in 2011, including Johnson who is racing with his 16-year-old daughter Izzy. The team formed 20 years ago, and excepting Izzy, all went to Southampton University on the U.K.'s southwest coast at different times, racing together and against each other over the years.
"The starts today were a bit open so we did some racing around the course and managed to shake out our one and twos before the final run and held onto them to the finish; we still had some good opportunities to practice moves which was good fun, and while the conditions were tough they were raceable," says Johnson. "Ben, Andy and I are the helms of our 3v3 team, which is the format we're mostly used to; the 2V2 format with no spinnakers is a frenetic and challenging format where no combination is safe until you cross that finish line. It helps that we are quite a unit, we understand each other and what we're trying to do. The event will be won and lost in the knockout phases, and we can use lessons learned this week to do well tomorrow."
Trailing fellow American teams by just one point, New York Yacht Club has chalked up 12 points over 16 races, winning both races they sailed today. Longtime fans of the 3v3 format, the two skippers for the New York Yacht Club, Clay Bischoff and Peter Levesque, won a pair of world titles in 2007 and 2009, and are adjusting to the new format for the 2025 Team Racing World Championship.
"We were pretty excited to see the sun poke out and the breeze pick up, " says Levesque. "We had a really fun day in the big breeze, it felt good, although there wasn't a whole lot of team racing. It was all about just trying to get around the course; it seemed like if you didn't get off the line, you could fall behind quickly and it was hard to catch up. I'm personally a fan of 3v3 but the 2v2 has been fun; it's a very different game. There's a lot of things that you would never consider doing in 3v3 that you have to do in 2v2. It is a bit of a mind shift. We've been getting better with every race, learning how the regatta is going and how umpires call things."
Italian Team has labored hard to get seven points on the board this week but crew Demetrio Sposato says his team has not given up and they're still in the game. Collectively the team has a ton of experience team racing in Optis; three crew competed in the Team Race Optimist Worlds in 2015 and received a bronze medal the following year in the same event. But that was a while ago, notes Sposato; he's happy with the progress they've made sailing in the Sonar for the first time.
"We have won a lot of starts and we were ahead in many races, but because of a few mistakes we're a little discouraged as our performance doesn't mirror our abilities; we know we are better and are improving. We won two out of three races today and the last one was very close. I think we are fast and most importantly, we are completing maneuvers with more confidence."
Inés Balestrini is thrilled to be racing this week; she's not only here to race but as a new member of the World Sailing Team Racing Committee, she's here to learn as much as possible about team racing to take back to Argentina. Her team has struggled this week to maintain consistency and will go into the final day of racing with a hard-earned five points on the board.
"We're a little frustrated but every loss is a lesson, so we are happy that we are practicing a lot," says Balestrini. "For us as a new team, getting this team racing experience will help us to develop more team racing in our country. We are fortunate to have two high level Opti coaches who are very familiar with team racing which has been very helpful but of course, this is a game, so sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But we're in the game, we are having a fantastic time and are excited to be here."
Intended format for Sunday, June 1:
- Going into the final day of the 2025 Team Racing World Championship, the intended format will continue races of Stage 1 through to race 120.
- If time allows, Stage 2 will consist of a single round robin sailed amongst the top 6 teams.
- The teams in Stage 2 will be ranked according to their wins ahead of all teams not sailing in Stage 2.
- If Stage 2 is completed by 1330, then Stage 3 will be a first to 2 wins knock-out match between the top two teams.
- No warning signal will be made after 1500.
Current results are available here.