This year’s yacht racing season got off to a strong start in January with a storming opening event to SailGP Season 6 in Perth, Australia that delivered two great days of on-the-water action – followed up by the culmination of two Jules Verne Trophy Ultim campaigns, where we saw Thomas Coville’s Sodebo and Alex Barrier’s The Famous Project CIC crews both survive cataclysmic conditions in a North Atlantic storm as they completed their nonstop laps of the planet.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2026, there’s so much more to come for sail racing fans to enjoy…
(Much) more SailGP
SailGP has become the gift that just keeps on giving, with Season 6 featuring 13 teams and close to a regatta per month over the rest of this year.
Following on from the success of Perth in January, the circus moves on in February to Auckland, New Zealand – where home fans will have their fingers and toes crossed that Peter Burling’s Black Foils F50 will be repaired and back in action after the Kiwi’s run-in with the Swiss.
From there the 13-boat fleet heads back to Australia for event three at the ever-popular fan-favourite venue of Sydney over the weekend of February 28 / March 1.
Then, in April, the teams head across the Pacific and several time zones to Brazil, where the delayed debut event in Rio de Janeiro could set new records for crowds ashore and on the water. Mubadala Brazil skipper Martine Grael and many of her sailing overachiever family are household names in the country so the atmosphere should be nothing short of electric.
After that, it’s Bermuda and then New York during May, and Halifax in Canada in June, before a transatlantic hop to Portsmouth in the UK at the end of July, Sassnitz, Germany in August, followed in September by the debut of Valencia, Spain and a return to Geneva, Switzerland.
SailGP will round the year out in the United Arab Emirates with two back-to-back events during November: the first in Dubai over the weekend of the 21st and 22nd, followed by the Grand Final in Abu Dhabi on the 28th and 29th.
The return of the America’s Cup
The America’s Cup is finally coming out of hibernation. To be fair, that’s not actually accurate from the point of view of the five competing teams who have been working flat out since the end of AC37 in Barcelona in 2024.
