Great Britain’s SailGP team ‘hurting’ after failing to make final in home event
Great Britain’s SailGP team ‘hurting’ after failing to make final in home event
Tom CarySun, July 26, 2026 at 7:02 PM UTC
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Emirates GBR were well off the pace for most of the weekend - Andrew Matthews/PA
Dylan Fletcher was at a complete loss to explain what went wrong after Britain’s SailGP team failed to advance to the final of their home event in Portsmouth, as Spain emerged victorious.
Emirates GBR are the reigning SailGP champions, having won the fifth season of the sailing league last autumn, scooping the $2m first prize.
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’s championship.
However, Fletcher admitted the team would have to go away and lick their wounds after what he described as a “tough, tough day” on the water.
Realistically, GBR needed to pick up where they left off on Saturday and win at least one of Sunday’s 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.
There was further disappointment for two British Olympic legends in the final, with Iain Percy’s Artemis finishing runner-up to Spain, and Giles Scott’s Canada third.
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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.
GBR were leapfrogged by both the US SailGP team and Swedish team Artemis in the championship.
“At this point, you’ve got to be fair to say that we’re not performing at the level we’re capable of,” said GBR skipper Fletcher. “Although we came out with some better starts today, we didn’t deliver in other areas. So yeah. It always hurts more at a home event, especially with friends and family here. It was a tough, tough day for the team.”
The weekend did highlight the extraordinary competitiveness of the fleet as a whole, with the Swiss team becoming the 10th different winner across the 10 fleet races in race five.
Strategist Hannah Mills, who described the weekend as “terrible”, pledged GBR would regroup and come back to challenge in the grand final.
“I think as a team, we’ve got to have that belief,” the double Olympic champion said. “Right now, it feels a long way off, but, you know, the margins are small.”
Source: “AOL Sports”
