While it took both teams out of the day’s racing, Sebastien Schneiter’s Swiss crew at least look likely to return to the water for Sunday’s concluding races; whereas the damage to Pete Burling’s Black Foils — the back few feet of one of the hulls knocked clean off — means the Kiwis take no further part in the weekend.
The umpires disqualified New Zealand as the boat that had to keep clear, giving them seven penalty points, a horrible start to the season. Burling made no secret of his sense of injustice, believing the Swiss hadn’t given him sufficient time and opportunity to keep clear after Schneiter had straightened out from the 90-degree jibing maneuver.
On the brighter side of a dramatic day, three teams sit tied at the top of the leaderboard after four nine-minute races on a tight race course off Bather’s Beach in Fremantle. Tom Slingsby’s Bonds Flying Roos delighted the home crowd with an easy Aussie win in the opening heat, but couldn’t maintain that level throughout the afternoon.
The Flying Roos sit in fourth place, still within striking distance of the front three. Not a bad score considering that Iain Jensen’s knee injury two days ago led to the late call-up for veteran Glenn Ashby, who flew from the other side of Australia to join the team. Slingsby told The Athletic: “Glenny and I have been talking about racing with each other ever since we were roommates before the Beijing Olympics. So we’ve been talking about it for the best part of 20 years and today was our first day (racing together).”
Quentin Delapierre and the French team adopted a bold starting strategy of lining up late in the start box behind the pack of 12 boats and making a late charge through a gap in the traffic. It was a high-risk approach that could easily have found the French with nowhere to go, but the cavalier Delapierre made it work for the first three races, clocking up finishes of 2, 1, 2 before faltering in the last heat with a ninth.
Much has been made of the arrival of ‘Team 13’, the Swedish-flagged crew called Artemis SailGP. Even though they are the only new boat to join the league this season, many pundits, including SailGP CEO Sir Russell Coutts, pick Nathan Outteridge’s crew as one of the favorites. The Swedes started like turnips in the opening heat, trailing across the finish in ninth place. But the Australian driver hit his stride after that, scoring 2,1 ,1 across the rest of the session.
So the French and the Swedish sit tied at the top, yet the third team to find itself also tied for the lead is perhaps the most surprising of all — the U.S. SailGP Team. After a torrid season in 2025 where Taylor Canfield’s crew finished dead last, the Americans have come out firing for the start of Season 6.
Laying down the most consistent results of anyone today, with scores of 3, 4, 3, 3, there was nothing lucky about the U.S. performance. Where the Americans have been able to hold their own in the lighter, sup-foiling conditions, today’s 12 to 15 knots of wind gave Canfield an opportunity for his crew to show what they could do in full-on hydrofoiling breeze.
“For sure, we have in the past felt more comfortable in those (sup-foiling) conditions, there’s no hiding that,” he said. “We’ve put in a lot of time off the water just studying all the data from the other teams who’s going the best. We’ve been chipping away all week long, the boat’s been getting faster, these are the little steps we’re looking for and it’s great to see a day like today.”
Canfield will be doing everything he can to keep the hard-won momentum rolling through to Sunday’s concluding races in the testing wind and waves of Perth.
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