A Short History of Yacht Racing
On 22 August 1851, a black-hulled schooner named America crossed the finish line off Cowes ahead of fifteen of the Royal Yacht Squadron's finest, having raced 53 miles around the Isle of Wight. Queen Victoria, watching from the royal yacht, reportedly asked who was second; the answer that came back — Your Majesty, there is no second — has been quoted at every prize-giving since. The ornate silver ewer the Americans carried home became the America's Cup, the oldest trophy in international sport, and the race around the Wight became the founding myth of a sport that now spans foiling monohulls flying at 35 knots and solo sailors racing non-stop around the planet.
Before 1851: gentlemen, wagers and the Water Club
Yacht racing predates the America's Cup by more than a century. The Water Club of the Harbour of Cork — today the Royal Cork Yacht Club — was founded in 1720 and is generally accepted as the world's oldest yacht club, organising fleet manoeuvres that were as much naval pageantry as competition. In England, the Cumberland Fleet raced on the Thames from 1775, and the Yacht Club founded at the Thatched House Tavern in 1815 became the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1833, settling at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Racing in this era was a wealthy gentleman's wager: large cutters and schooners with professional crews, heavy bets, and handicapping done by negotiation rather than formula. Cowes Week, first raced in 1826, survives from this world and remains one of the longest-running regattas anywhere.
The America's Cup: 132 years of American defence
After 1851 the Cup became a challenge trophy, and for 132 years the New York Yacht Club never lost it — the longest winning streak in sport. The defences produced legendary boats and characters: the vast J-Class sloops of the 1930s such as Ranger and Endeavour, Sir Thomas Lipton's five gallant failures with his Shamrocks between 1899 and 1930, and the post-war 12-Metre era raced off Newport, Rhode Island. The streak ended in September 1983, when Australia II — with its secret winged keel designed under Ben Lexcen — beat Dennis Conner's Liberty 4-3 after trailing 3-1, a result that interrupted national television schedules in Australia and made Cup history. Since then the Cup has travelled to San Diego, Auckland, Valencia and Barcelona, and the boats have morphed from 12-Metres to catamarans to today's AC75 foiling monohulls, which lift clear of the water on hydraulic arms and exceed 50 knots.
Offshore classics: Fastnet, Hobart, Bermuda
While the Cup occupied millionaires, offshore racing grew from a different impulse: proving that amateur crews could race small yachts across open water. The Bermuda Race began in 1906, from the US east coast 635 miles across the Gulf Stream. The first Fastnet Race ran in 1925 — 605 miles from Cowes round the Fastnet Rock off southwest Ireland and back to Plymouth (today finishing in Cherbourg) — and led directly to the founding of the Royal Ocean Racing Club. The Sydney Hobart, 628 miles down the Australian coast and across the Bass Strait, started as a cruise-in-company in 1945 and became the southern hemisphere's great Boxing Day institution. These races also taught the sport its hardest lessons: the 1979 Fastnet storm killed fifteen sailors and triggered a revolution in safety equipment, stability standards and crew training, while the 1998 Sydney Hobart, in which six died, reinforced them.
Racing alone: from Chichester to the Vendée Globe
Single-handed ocean racing began as a newspaper stunt and became the sport's purest test. The first OSTAR, a solo transatlantic race, ran in 1960 and was won by Francis Chichester in 40 days. In 1966-67 Chichester sailed Gipsy Moth IV around the world with one stop, and in 1968-69 the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race asked sailors to do it non-stop: of nine starters only Robin Knox-Johnston finished, after 312 days at sea, while Bernard Moitessier famously abandoned the race while leading and kept sailing toward Tahiti. That race's modern descendant, the Vendée Globe, founded by Philippe Jeantot in 1989, sends solo skippers non-stop and unassisted around the three great capes every four years from Les Sables-d'Olonne in France. Armel Le Cléac'h set a long-standing record of 74 days in 2017; in the 2024-25 edition Charlie Dalin demolished it, finishing in just over 64 days aboard a foiling IMOCA 60.
Measurement wars: rating rules and level classes
Much of yacht racing's history is the unglamorous story of handicap rules — formulas that let different boats race fairly, and which designers immediately exploit. The International Rule of 1907 produced the Metre classes (6, 8 and 12-Metre), while America used the Universal Rule, which gave the world the J-Class. Post-war offshore racing ran under the RORC rule and the CCA rule, merged in 1970 into the IOR, which dominated the 1970s and 80s before dying of its own complexity. Today's offshore fleets race under IRC, ORC or simple performance handicaps, while one-design classes — from the Star (1911) and the Dragon (1929) to the Olympic ILCA dinghy and the 49er — remove the measurement question entirely by making every boat identical. The tension between open design innovation and fair, affordable racing remains unresolved after a century, and is arguably the engine of the sport's progress.
The professional era: round-the-world crews and ocean sprints
The Whitbread Round the World Race, first run in 1973-74 with a fleet of cruising yachts and amateur crews, evolved into the fully professional Volvo Ocean Race and today's The Ocean Race — a crewed, multi-stage lap of the planet through the Southern Ocean, with stopovers from Cape Town to Auckland to Itajaí. Along the way the sport professionalised: paid crews, shore teams, meteorologists routing boats remotely, and carbon-fibre flyers like the VO70s, which could log over 600 miles in 24 hours. France built its own parallel universe of professional ocean racing — the Route du Rhum (solo transatlantic to Guadeloupe, since 1978), the Transat Jacques Vabre, and the Mini Transat for 6.5-metre pocket rockets — making offshore racers household names there in a way no other country matches.
The foiling revolution
The most visible change of the last two decades is that racing yachts learned to fly. Hydrofoils lift the hull clear of the water, slashing drag: the Moth dinghy class proved the concept in the 2000s, the AC72 catamarans of the 2013 America's Cup in San Francisco brought it to the sport's biggest stage, and Emirates Team New Zealand's AC75 monohulls completed the transformation. Foils have since spread to the IMOCA 60s of the Vendée Globe, to the F50 catamarans of SailGP — a global stadium-racing circuit founded in 2019, regularly clocking speeds above 50 knots — and to Olympic classes via the Nacra 17 and the iQFOiL windsurfer. A modern foiling race bears little outward resemblance to 1851, yet the essentials are unchanged: wind, water, a course, and the ancient question of who is first around the mark.
Explore on the map
The waters that shaped this history are all still raced today — the Solent off Cowes, Port Phillip and the Derwent at the end of the Hobart course, the Bay of Biscay where Vendée skippers take their first Atlantic blows. Open the interactive map to explore these legendary venues alongside thousands of marinas and cruising destinations worldwide, and plan your own pilgrimage to the racecourses where the sport was made.