What Happened at Worlds

We finished the biggest event of our 2025 calendar, the Nacra 17 World Championship, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy in October. The event was six days long with two days of qualifying, 4 days of gold/silver fleet, and a final 4-boat medal race.

Launching from Poetto Beach in Sardinia (c) Sailing Energy

We arrived at the venue on September 21st for two full weeks of training with João and our Canadian training partners. We trained in Cagliari over the winter of 2024, so the location was familiar, but the change of seasons brought new wind patterns we were eager to study. The warmer temperatures were also appreciated! The hours of platform set-up and system testing that Carson undertook on our European platform earlier this year paid off; our equipment felt well-tuned and ready. Once we switched to a new race mainsail with a flatter profile, Lindsay was equally pleased with the sail shapes and power management she could achieve with her settings and controls.

(c) Sailing Energy

Going into the event, we knew we were on the cusp of the top 20, having achieved this result in June at the European Championship. We set this as our goal, feeling confident and also knowing we would have to sail well to achieve this result. We had our best individual race result in a World Championship on Day 1, leading the entire Nacra 17 fleet around the top mark in race 3 and finishing 6th. We demonstrated vast improvement in our downwind speed, particularly on the windy 16+ knot days.

Despite these good moments, we stumbled on Day 2 with our first upwind legs and missed the top 20 split at the end of the qualifying series by a few points. Sometimes events don’t go as planned, and that continued to be the case for us on Day 4 when Lindsay sustained a traumatic knee injury during a downwind that prohibited us from competing in the last two days of the event. João sped her into shore to see the US Sailing PT, who couldn’t medically recommend returning to the water given the instability of both Lindsay’s knee and the Nacra 17 platform. Once we knew we could no longer race, the focus shifted to getting Lindsay back to the US quickly for evaluation and imaging, which confirmed an MCL injury. Luckily, her injury is non-surgical and she is on the mend with the help of an awesome physical therapy team at NPT Healthworks in Newport.

It was disheartening to see our scoreline fill with DNC’s. We ended with a final rank of 32nd, about the same as last year’s World Championship finish (34th), having only competed in two-thirds of the races. This event reminded us that progress is not linear, but as long as we are diligent in the process of learning, pushing to execute, and evaluating, the results will come. By the numbers, we didn’t improve over our last world championship score, but for the first time since partnering up in 2023, we are ranked by World Sailing as the top American Nacra 17 team. This is our small victory for 2025, and one that we intend to hold on to as we forge ahead in 2026. We are already working with our coach to develop a winter program addressing start line awareness and acceleration, as well as tight-lane foiling and upwind moding. We will continue working with international training partners and are headed back to Europe once Lindsay is healed to take part in larger group training with coaches’ regattas over the winter. It is a long path to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, and we are still on the grind!

(c) Sailing Energy