Twelve Skippers Set to Challenge Pauline Courtois’s Five-Year Reign

By Sailing Times Newsroom·14 September 2026·1 min read

Pauline Courtois has won the Women’s Match Racing World Championship five years running, and the field assembled to end that streak is now set. St. Francis Yacht Club has confirmed the twelve skippers for the 2026 championship, sailed September 30 to October 4 in San Francisco Bay, and eleven of them are there for the same reason: nobody else has managed to beat her yet.

Courtois returns with her Match in Pink by Normandy Elite Team out of Le Havre, France, defending a title that has been hers alone for five straight years running. The rest of the fleet was pulled from World Sailing’s Women’s Match Racing Ranking list, the same pool of top-ranked skippers that’s tried and failed to dislodge her four times already.

The championship will be sailed in St. Francis Yacht Club’s own fleet of J/22s, in round robin format, with each skipper running a crew of four or five. Identical boats, direct match-ups, no handicap to hide behind: round robin match racing in one-designs is about as close as the sport gets to a straight fight, which makes a five-year unbeaten run look less like dominance and more like an open question nobody has solved yet.