Australia has won the 2019 World Sailing Youth Match Racing World Championship in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with New Zealand finishing in second and Denmark in third position. This is the second time the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia has won the event, having taken home the title in 2017 and were runners up in 2016.

Australia has now won the Youth Match Racing World Championship three times and finished in the silver medal position in two other events, meaning they are the only country to remain in the Top 2 for each World Championship contested so far.

Unfortunately, Yekaterinburg didn’t allow for the competition to play out on the water, with racing abandoned for the day at 1500hrs when the time limit expired. Fortunately for Australia, a fantastic round robin scorecard of 12-2 was enough to secure the title from New Zealand.

“We are obviously super stoked right now. It would have been great to win on the water but we put the hard yards in at the beginning of the event and it’s paid today. It’s been a long campaign for us but we are so happy to win the World Championship,” commented skipper Tom Grimes.

The CYCA’s team of Tom Grimes, James Hodgson, Jess Grimes and Harry Hall have led the competition from Day 1, finishing the first round robin with a 10 – 1 scorecard. They then carried this momentum into round two, which was only partially complete with Australia scoring 4 wins from 5 starts.

This was enough for them to hold off New Zealand’s Nick Engot-Johnson who finished second on 12 – 4. Denmark’s Jeppe Borch finished in the bronze position on a tie breaker with Poland’s Igor Tarasiuk.