Lake Garda opens Lombardia Foil Grand Prix with wingfoil, kitefoil racing

The Lake Garda season opener did more than hand out trophies. It showed who already has the speed, the control and the fleet depth to matter all summer, with Wingfoil Racing and Kitefoil turning Campione del Garda into an early warning system for the 2026 foil calendar.

The first part of the Lombardia Foil Grand Prix ran from June 5 to June 7 at Campione del Garda, and the racing came with the kind of shifting wind that exposes mistakes fast. Forty-five athletes took part over three days, and the Wingfoil fleet alone drew 38 registered competitors for 12 races, a workload that separated the sharp from the merely quick. Michele Capitani emerged as the headline name, winning the Wingfoil fleet with 12 net points, while Alessandro José Tomasi and Francesco Cappuzzo finished tied on 17 net points behind him.

That gap matters because Garda rarely flatters anybody. When the wind keeps moving and the course keeps changing, the riders who can stay clean through starts, mark roundings and pressure moments usually carry that form into the rest of the season. Campione’s first chapter produced that kind of signal: Capitani looked controlled, not just fast, and the fleet around him was deep enough to make the result feel earned rather than cosmetic. Local reporting also identified Marta Monge as the women’s Wingfoil winner, adding another clear marker from a class that keeps expanding its competitive base.

Kitefoil brought its own weight to the opening segment, with Massimo Chieffo and Elisa Houze taking the wins in a field that helped give the Grand Prix a broader foil identity than a single-discipline stop. The event was described locally as the seventh edition, and that continuity matters. This was not a novelty weekend built for photographs; it was an established date on a lake that knows how to test high-performance foiling.

The scale will grow again immediately. Campione’s calendar and Eurosaf’s event directory both list the Lombardia EUROSAF ETF26 Foil European Championship in Campione del Garda from June 10 to June 13, extending the week and widening the range of boats on the water. With the event recognized by Eurosaf as an inclusive European championship and local coverage putting the total field at about 80 athletes from 10 nations, Lake Garda has already started to look like the place where the summer foil hierarchy gets sorted out first.