Australia Wins Inaugural Rio Sail Grand Prix, Takes Championship Lead

Australia did not just win in Rio de Janeiro. The BONDS Flying Roos turned the inaugural Enel Rio Sail Grand Prix into a championship swing, sweeping all four races they entered on Sunday and climbing to the top of the Rolex SailGP Championship standings.

Tom Slingsby’s crew finished the weekend with 35 points, moving past Emirates GBR, which slipped to second on 28 after a difficult Rio campaign. That gap matters because the championship has now tightened at the top heading into the North American stretch, with the U.S. SailGP Team holding third on 27 points and Los Gallos close behind on 25. In a class where one bad venue can undo a month of work, Rio showed how fast the picture can change.

The Australian performance was especially striking because Guanabara Bay was anything but straightforward. Sugarloaf Mountain, the bay’s shifting breeze and the large swells created a racecourse that punished hesitation and rewarded clean boat handling. Saturday’s racing produced four different winners, a sign of just how unstable the weekend was, and Mubadala Brazil’s home crowd saw its own boat suffer technical problems before one of the races.

Australia found the answer on the final day. After missing a couple of races on day one because of technical issues, the BONDS Flying Roos reset and then took control, winning the three qualifying fleet races and the winner-takes-all final. Tash Bryant said the conditions were "quite tricky" and that the team had to settle itself into the breeze and "get in the groove" as the day improved. By the time the final started, the Australians were not surviving the conditions. They were using them.

The result was historic on more than one level. Rio was SailGP’s first event in Brazil and, according to Reuters, its first visit to South America. It had originally been slated for May 2025 before a defect in select wingsails in the F50 fleet forced a cancellation. That delay only sharpened the return, and the race week delivered the kind of pressure-cooker the circuit was built for: close margins, mechanical risk and elite crews chasing tiny gains in 50-foot foiling catamarans.

Los Gallos finished second in Rio after a steady qualifying run, while Artemis reached its first SailGP event final and placed third. Mubadala Brazil ended ninth in the event after its technical problems and was awarded 10 event points under the series’ penalty system. The fleet now turns to Bermuda on May 9-10, with Australia carrying the lead and everyone else suddenly chasing.