Peter Burling will line up against Emirates Team New Zealand for the first time in his career this weekend, helming the principal Luna Rossa boat at the Louis Vuitton 38th America’s Cup Preliminary Regatta in Cagliari.
It is the moment many Kiwi sailing fans have been quietly dreading since April last year, when Burling and Team New Zealand confirmed they had parted ways after a decade together. The three-time America’s Cup winner signed with the Italian challenger Luna Rossa two months later, and after almost a year of training and development the 35-year-old will finally pull on a rival uniform in a competitive setting.
The Sardinia regatta is the first competitive event of the Road to Naples, the qualification series leading into the next America’s Cup match in southern Italy in July 2027. Eight crews from five syndicates are competing on equalised AC40 foiling monohulls, with one official practice day already completed and three days of racing running from Friday through Sunday. Racing starts at 3pm Cagliari time each day, which is 1am Saturday morning New Zealand time for the opening fleet races.
Burling has been named as one of two helmsmen on Luna Rossa’s principal entry, with the Italian team confirming a dual-helm setup across both of its boats. The Italians are running a second crew built around their women’s and youth squad, including Marco Gradoni, who skippered Luna Rossa’s youth campaign in 2024. The format calls for up to three fleet races on each of Friday and Saturday and up to two more on Sunday, followed by a one-on-one match race between the top two boats to decide the regatta winner.
Team New Zealand is fielding two crews of its own. Australian Nathan Outteridge, who has stepped into Burling’s old role as the syndicate’s primary helmsman, will skipper the senior boat. Seb Menzies, fresh off winning the 49er world championship in Quiberon last weekend with George Lee Rush, leads the women’s and youth entry. Great Britain is also running two boats under the GB1 and Athena Pathway banners, with the Swiss Alinghi syndicate and French newcomers La Roche-Posay Racing Team rounding out the fleet.
The matchup carries an obvious emotional charge. Burling won the Cup with Team New Zealand in Bermuda in 2017, Auckland in 2021 and Barcelona in 2024, sailing alongside Blair Tuke and Glenn Ashby in a partnership that became almost synonymous with the Auld Mug itself. His departure was unusually public for a sport that prefers to keep its personnel disputes behind closed doors, with both sides confirming the split came down to differences over the structure of his future role and the syndicate’s plans for the next campaign.
Outteridge has played down the rivalry but acknowledged the strangeness of the moment. “It’s been a few years sitting side-by-side like this in a lot of meetings and now you are against each other,” he told RNZ. “But Pete and I have had a great relationship over the last 15 years.”
Burling himself has stayed measured. “It’s a very strong team that I’ve always respected. We have an exceptional sailing line-up and we’ve done great work over these past months. I can’t wait to get back on the racecourse,” he said in pre-event comments.
The technical side of the regatta is unusual in that all the AC40s are supplied by the event in identical specification, so the racing is genuinely a contest of crew work, tactics and starting nerve rather than design. The AC40 is a one-design version of the AC75 used at the main Cup match, with a smaller four-person crew and top speeds in excess of 40 knots in a breeze. It is the closest thing the sport has to a level playing field, which makes the Sardinia regatta an unusually pure read on which crews have developed best over the off-season.
For Luna Rossa, Sardinia is also something of a home regatta. The team is backed by Prada and sails out of Cagliari for much of its training, so the local knowledge sits firmly on the Italian side of the ledger. Team New Zealand has spent the past weeks training on the same patch of water, but the Italians know the Bay of Angels and its trademark mistral breezes better than anyone else in the fleet.
Whatever happens this weekend, the result will not change the standings for Naples directly, since the preliminary regattas are weighted lightly compared with the main challenger selection series next year. But they are the only opportunity all eight Cup crews get to race each other before the formal qualification rounds begin, and the form lines drawn here will be studied closely by every campaign manager in the fleet.
For New Zealand viewers, the broadcasts are free on the America’s Cup YouTube channel and Facebook page from 1am NZT each race day, with replays available almost immediately afterwards. Sky Sport is also expected to carry highlight packages within its dedicated America’s Cup coverage.
The bigger story is whether Burling, racing against the team he built his career with, can pull off a result that vindicates one of the most discussed personnel calls in New Zealand sport. The answer starts arriving this weekend.
What do you make of Burling racing against Team New Zealand for the first time? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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