Spain wins New York Sail Grand Prix, becomes first repeat winner of SailGP season
NEW YORK — After a shaky start to its SailGP season, a Spanish victory at the New York Sail Grand Prix on Sunday shows that Diego Botín's team is fully back on track.
Botín's group won the last event in San Francisco back in March, making them the first repeat winners of 2025 after there were five different winners in the first five events.
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While the cheer from the crowd on Governor's Island was certainly loud for the jubilant Spanish, it had been just as big for the winners of the opening race of Sunday's session, when Brazil crossed the finish in first place. As the first and currently only female driver in SailGP, two-time Olympic gold medalist Martine Grael made history as she steered her hydrofoiling F50 to the race win.
Nor was that moment of Brazilian brilliance a flash in the pan. After three soggy races in light winds on Saturday, three more fleet races for the 12-boat competition offered plenty of opportunity for moving up or down the leaderboard. The weather conditions were a vast improvement on Sunday, with sunshine and improved breezes making for consistent foiling around the course. Not that the New York race is ever straightforward, with strong currents and the close proximity of the imposing Manhattan skyline always influencing the wildly dancing wind direction.
After winning the first race of the afternoon, Brazil followed up with a solid fourth. This put Grael on the verge of the three-boat final, which would have been another first for a female driver. Meanwhile, Quentin Delapierre and the French team had been quietly chipping away with some decent, if unspectacular, scores across the weekend. This time, the French seized the initiative at the start and won the race, giving them a strong points edge and a smooth path into the final three.
NO WORDS 🤩 🤩 🤩 pic.twitter.com/siU4YZHtCQ
— SailGP (@SailGP) June 8, 2025
The fight for the other two places was a three-way battle between New Zealand, Brazil and Spain.
Pete Burling executed a good start and took the Kiwis into the final with a fourth-place finish. Australia won the race, making Tom Slingsby's team the only crew to win two heats across this weekend. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for the Aussies.
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'Yeah, two wins, and two last places in some other races, so they cancel each other out,' he told The Athletic disconsolately, scratching his head as to why his usually reliable team had fallen off its game in New York and slumped to fifth place.
It was a weekend to forget for some of the other leading lights from earlier in the season, with Canada and Great Britain finishing tied on points and ending up seventh and eighth, respectively.
Having raced so cleanly throughout the weekend, Spain got itself into trouble in the early stages of the sixth fleet race, starting poorly and compounding its woes with a penalty after fouling Brazil on the first lap. Botín was on the ropes. But he split away from Grael on the final upwind leg to hook into stronger wind on the Brooklyn side of the course, surging past Brazil to seize the third spot into the final.
Botín admitted to The Athletic that the close tussle with Brazil was exactly the shot of adrenaline his team needed to get in the right mindset for the three-boat showdown against France and New Zealand.
'For that final race, you just go all in, you go for the win,' he said. 'We started the day really well, and we thought maybe we were in the final a bit too easy, which put us into a defensive mode, which was not helping at all. Then in the second race, we hit something hard under the water, maybe a tree or something, so that made us lose a lot of places. And in that last race, we didn't have a good start and we had to fight back quite hard. That also gave us a push to just fight as hard as we could and it got us a good momentum for the final.'
In the final, Spain dominated the approach to the start, launching into an early lead ahead of New Zealand. France misjudged its run-in to the line and was never a threat for the win.
When the Kiwis momentarily fell off their foils at the bottom of the course near the Statue of Liberty, Spain's lead became unassailable. Botín's crew started the celebrations well before it crossed the finish line in front of the New York crowd.
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'Two wins in a row is super hard in SailGP,' grinned Botín, 'so we are super grateful for having done this. Six events done and six events still to go, so everything is to play for this season.'
SailGP resumes in mid-July at Portsmouth in southern England. This is the first of five events in Europe before the grand final in Abu Dhabi at the end of November.
(Photo of Spain celebrating in New York: Ricardo Pinto / SailGP)
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