What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago, the US team’s SailGP season was in tatters after an embarrassing capsize while getting towed out through Sydney Harbour for a day of practice racing. With their wing rig severely damaged, Taylor Canfield’s crew didn’t even make it to the start line of Sydney 2025.
Fast-forward to March 2026 and Canfield’s crew mastered the light wind conditions better than any of the more fancied teams to win the event. Sydney Harbour has a reputation for delivering strong wind but today’s twilight racing barely lifted over 7 knots of breeze. After the high-wind drama of Perth and Auckland to open the season, this was a return to the slow drift of last season’s final in Abu Dhabi.
From muscling the F50s around the course in strong winds, these soft, sub-foiling breezes require a completely different skill set. A match racing keelboat racer by background, Canfield has always looked most at home in a slow-boat race.
After a solid opening day in marginal foiling breeze on Saturday, the Americans really came into their own on Sunday.
Nailing the starts
While starting fast is always at a premium in SailGP, Sunday’s small race course offered minimum overtaking opportunities, making the launch off the line more critical than ever.
The most popular place to start in today’s races was off the bottom end of the line, the left-hand end furthest from the breeze direction. This would give the boat the best trajectory for a fast (a relative term) angle to the first turning mark.
However, this favored spot proved so popular that it often became a traffic jam. Other teams — notably the Danes, the Italians and the Americans — decided to let the greedier bunch scrap for the same optimum position on the line. Instead, they went for a safer launch out of the middle of the start.
“The plan was definitely to be elbows-out and get in front of the pack and kind of control our own destiny,” Canfield told The Athletic.
Canfield — who is always self-critical when the U.S. team suffer a poor start — today executed three excellent launches off the line in the 11-boat fleet races. Finish scores of 3, 1, 6 were just sufficient for the U.S. to claim the third spot in the final race against the Spanish and the British.
The U.S. SailGP team is towed back to the technical area past the Sydney Opera House after their win (Jason Ludlow for SailGP)
First on to the foil
While Spain executed a poor start in the final, the U.S. and the British were neck-and-neck as they launched off the line in non-foiling mode. A few seconds later, though, and there was just enough of a gust to offer the smallest chance of hydrofoiling.
When Dylan Fletcher’s flight controller Luke ‘Parko’ Parkinson managed to lift the British boat out of the water, it looked like the red boat might take the early lead. However, just a split-second later, the U.S. flight controller Hans Henken managed to match Parko’s move and get the blue boat motoring slightly ahead of the British.
“I could see it all happening to leeward (on the British boat) and I knew we were close (to foiling),“ said Canfield. “I knew it was going to happen and, you know, being patient in that moment was what we needed to do; not push to get on the foils and fail. We got a nice acceleration from a slightly better angle than the British.”
Soon after they passed the first turning mark onto the downwind leg, the turbulent air wafting off the back of the U.S. wing rig was starting to cause problems for Fletcher. He was forced to jibe away sooner than we would have liked.
As Fletcher admitted to The Athletic: “Yeah, we jibed when we did because we were just starting to feel the effects of their gas (turbulent wind) and our speed had just started to drop. So we entered the jibe at 41kmph and we really need like 43 or 44 (to stay foiling through the maneuver). Anything from there, we’re going to be losing, so that felt like our one shot to make the jibe.”
This forced the British to make jibes to get down to the bottom of the course while the Americans jibed just once, and that was the deciding factor in securing what went on to be an easy victory.
The U.S. SailGP team races alongside Emirates Great Britain SailGP (Felix Diemer for SailGP)
Four-up works to Weis’s strengths
When the wind drops, the race management orders the crews to reduce from their standard six on board in order to take weight out of the boat. Sunday was a four-on-board day, and for most teams, it’s always the grinders in the front, the heavy muscle men, who are first to be jettisoned.
However, in the U.S. team’s case, Anna Weis — the only female grinder on the tour — stays on board. She continues to do the job she does on a regular basis, whereas the female strategists on other teams have to switch roles and get on the grinding handles, something they’re physically not trained for.
Victory was a great moment for the U.S. team and for Weis personally. “I feel like my heart rate’s still really high and the adrenaline is just still kicking in,” she told The Athletic. “It’s such an incredible feeling and it’s so special to celebrate with all my teammates and the whole entire team.”
Anna Weis and Taylor Canfield (Felix Diemer for SailGP)
First miss for Australia
Sydney hosted the first-ever SailGP event back in 2019, and Tom Slingsby has steered the Australian team into every home final since then, winning a few of them along the way.
This was the first time Australia has missed the podium battle.
“Pretty frustrating,” Slingsby told The Athletic, and he sounded less than happy with the way the race course and the start line had been set up. The GPS-positioned start marks were moving too much in the final countdown to the start, said the Australian skipper.
“You’ve got a minute to go and you’ve got your spot on the start and you see the start mark just take off. There’s a few frustrating moments there for sure, but everyone had the same conditions and they did better than us,” said Slingsby, trying to be magnanimous in defeat.
The U.S. celebrate on the podium on Shark Island (Andrew Baker for SailGP)
Australasia done, now to the Americas
Still, for all of the hurt of today, Slingsby and the Australians are still second overall in the season standings after three events completed in Australasia. As the bandwagon packs up and moves across the Pacific for the next event in Rio de Janeiro, Great Britain holds the overall lead ahead of Australia, with the Sydney victory lifting the Americans to a surprise third overall.
The French will return to competition in Rio, with their F50 being repaired from a combination of parts from their own boat and the remains of the New Zealand boat that suffered catastrophic damage from the collision in Auckland.
So it will be 12 teams on the water for SailGP’s debut in South America, while Pete Burling and the Black Foils are yet to learn when they might get back into the season.