Late drama in Switzerland crowns wingfoil racing world champion

Lake Silvaplana delivered the kind of finish wingfoil racing lives for: a frustrating delay, a sudden wind fill shortly before 16:00, and a Medal Series that rewrote both title fights in a single late-afternoon burst. The 2026 Ensis ENGADINWING WingFoil Racing World Cup Switzerland closed on June 21 with riders from 18 countries still waiting for the Maloja thermal to break through the stubborn northerly gradient, then racing hard once it finally did.

The men’s final turned on contact and composure. Alessandro Tomasi and Francesco Cappuzzo, the two Italian leaders who had been tied on points after the previous day and left Tomasi wearing the yellow bib on tie-break, collided on the opening upwind leg of the grand final. Tomasi took the penalty and fell to the back of the fleet, while Kamil Manowiecki moved into the opening and made it count. The Polish rider, who had already won the Türkiye stop in Urla in May, beat Julien Rattotti in a tight first race of the final, then kept his nerve to win again and lock up the event title. Cappuzzo took silver and Tomasi settled for bronze, a sharp reversal for a matchup that had looked like an all-Italian duel only 24 hours earlier.

The women’s race flipped just as abruptly. Maddalena Spanu had built one of the most complete weeks on the lake, qualifying with three wins, seven second-place finishes and two thirds after dropping her worst result, enough to earn a direct berth in the final alongside Vaina Picot. Picot had been the form rider through qualifying, carrying a net score of 12 points after 15 races and arriving in Silvaplana with momentum from April’s Formula Wing European Championships in Naples and May’s World Cup stop in Urla. But in the Medal Race, Picot and China’s Yana Li both fell in the unstable breeze just before the finish line, and Spanu took the opening she needed to win the race and the overall crown. The result underlined how thin the margin is in this circuit: one clean run mattered more than a week of near-perfection.

Silvaplana’s fifth WingFoil World Cup again proved why the venue has become a benchmark for the sport. The combination of high-altitude conditions, delayed thermal wind and compressed medal racing forced the world’s best to treat setup, start timing and calm under pressure as championship skills, not side issues. With the Engadinwind program running through June 26 and the Formula Wing Youth and Open Masters events following at the same lake, Switzerland has become more than a scenic stop. It is now a decisive stage where the discipline’s pecking order can change in minutes.