{"id":90782,"date":"2026-07-26T20:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T20:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/90782\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T20:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T20:09:07","slug":"great-britains-sailgp-team-hurting-after-failing-to-make-final-in-home-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/90782\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Britain\u2019s SailGP team \u2018hurting\u2019 after failing to make final in home event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dylan Fletcher was at a complete loss to explain what went wrong after Britain\u2019s SailGP team failed to advance to the final of their home event in Portsmouth, as Spain emerged victorious.<\/p>\n

Emirates GBR are the reigning SailGP champions, having won the fifth season of the sailing league last autumn, scooping the $2m first prize.<\/p>\n

Hopes were high among the record 20,000-strong crowd in Portsmouth that they would triumph on home waters and improve on their third-place position in this season\u2019s championship.<\/p>\n

However, Fletcher admitted the team would have to go away and lick their wounds after what he described as a \u201ctough, tough day\u201d on the water.<\/p>\n

Realistically, GBR needed to pick up where they left off on Saturday<\/a> and win at least one of Sunday\u2019s two races. But fifth and sixth-place finishes left the British boat sixth and last in Group B, eight points off qualification for the four-boat final.<\/p>\n

There was further disappointment for two British Olympic legends in the final, with Iain Percy\u2019s Artemis finishing runner-up to Spain, and Giles Scott\u2019s Canada third.<\/p>\n

Whereas starts were the issue on Saturday, on Sunday GBR got away well enough in both races, but a mistake at the leeward mark in the first race of the day, when they should have split when battling the French boat, caused them to slip backwards. In the second race, GBR fell off their foils after getting rolled by the Swiss after the first mark. Sir Ben Ainslie, Emirates GBR chief executive, watching on from the hospitality lounge, looked stunned by the turn of events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dylan Fletcher was at a complete loss to explain what went wrong after Britain\u2019s SailGP team failed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,306,2836,771,330,333],"class_list":["post-90782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-portsmouth","tag-sailing","tag-sport","tag-standard","tag-us-content"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116988095001485436","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}