Nov 30 (Reuters) - Britain won the 2025 SailGP Championship on Sunday, beating New Zealand and Australia in a thrilling three-way final in Abu Dhabi to lift the trophy and a $2 million prize.
"It was an unbelievable final," said Emirates GBR skipper Dylan Fletcher. "All the three teams were amazing, any one of us could have won, but I'm just over the moon right now. What a team, what a year… I'm stoked".
As they bore down on the finish line, the British crew celebrated their first SailGP championship win beneath the towering "wing" sail of their bright red and white F50 catamaran with cheers, laughter, whoops and wild fist pumping.
Three-times winners Australia led off the start in Sunday's grand final, with Britain and New Zealand in hot pursuit as the at times fluky winds provided enough power for the crews to get their boats up on to their foils and "flying" above the water.
The lead changed hands several times, before Fletcher and strategist Hannah Mills were able to get clear water by reading tricky wind shifts on Abu Dhabi's compact course, where teams used SailGP's new 27.5-metre wing for the first time.
SailGP, backed by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, runs grand prix events in cities around the world each season, with cumulative points determining who makes the final shootout.
CONSISTENCY COUNTS FOR AINSLIE'S BRITISH TEAM
The British team founded by Ben Ainslie, who is also aiming to win the America's Cup in Naples in 2027, had gone into the final event of the SailGP season topping the leaderboard as the most consistent of the global league's 12 crews.
New Zealand's Black Foils, led by Peter Burling, had also been looking to win their first championship, while Australian Tom Slingsby's Flying Roos were aiming to regain the title they lost to Spain's Los Gallos in the 2024 grand final.
Slingsby said he was "incredibly proud" of the Flying Roos who made the championship final after a series of tightly-fought duels with Diego Botin's Los Gallos in the Abu Dhabi fleet event, adding that it had been "a season of highs and lows".
Burling's participation in the final weekend of the campaign had been in doubt during the week after he severed the tip of his right index finger during a practice session.
But although the three-times America's Cup winner and Olympic gold medallist was not going to let the setback stop him taking the wheel of his F50, Sunday's loss left Burling still in pursuit of the trophy that has eluded him.
"Definitely a bit of frustration from our end but you've got to be proud of the race we put together and the season we put together," Burling told reporters. "We're definitely all hurting now."
"Incredibly hard how the whole season gets decided on one shifty 10-minute race," Burling said of how he felt about losing out in a third grand final.
(Reporting by Alexander Smith in London; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Ed Osmond)
