CAPE TOWN (Reuters) -For the first time a female crew member featured in the team that won South Africa’s Lipton Challenge Cup, a sailing regatta steeped in history having been contested since 1909, after the Hermanus Yacht Club triumphed in Cape Town on Saturday.
The defending champion Royal Cape Yacht Club played host to the five-day event, Africa’s most prestigious regatta that bears the name of the man who gifted the trophy 116 years ago, Thomas Lipton, who used the race in part to promote his tea business.
Though female sailors have contested over many years, including an all-women crew from the Gqeberha Yacht Club in 2025, organisers said on Saturday they could find no record of a female on the winning yacht, providing a first for Scarlet Cilliers, who remarkably is still at school.
Hermanus Yacht Club will now host the event next year and won for the third time after previous success in 1969 and 1996, scoring 35 points across the 10 races. That was four ahead of the Royal Cape Yacht Club in second.
The 18-team field also included participants from under-privileged backgrounds in a race that every South African sailor wants to win.
South Africa did not exist in its current form when Lipton, who raced in five America’s Cups, donated the trophy and created a contest he hoped would keep the passion for recreational sailing alive in Southern Africa.
At least three ‘traditional courses’ are contested offshore – a windward-leeward or leeward-windward, an equilateral triangle and a quadrilateral – of no less than 12 nautical miles each.
(Reporting by Nick Said, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
