New Zealand sailors Seb Menzies and George Lee Rush have written themselves into the history books, becoming the youngest crew ever to win the 49er world championship after a heart stopping comeback in the final race off Quiberon on the west coast of France.
The 21 year olds entered the medal series with a two point lead and survived an extraordinary day of tactical chaos, light winds and start line drama to deny a vastly more experienced Dutch crew a fourth straight world title. According to Yachting New Zealand they became the youngest skiff combination by combined age to claim the open men’s crown, with Menzies also becoming the youngest skipper in the class’s three decade history to lift the trophy.
The final day produced the kind of theatre that has made the 49er one of the most watched classes on the Olympic sailing programme. Menzies and Lee Rush won the first medal race outright after recovering from a tangle at the pin end of the start line, finding clear air and pulling clear of Germany’s Jakob Meggendorfer and Andreas Spranger.
Everything looked set for a routine coronation in the second and final race. Then it nearly came apart. Caught again at the pin in the last seconds before the gun, the Kiwis found themselves stuck in eighth as the rest of the fleet escaped upwind in patchy, shifty conditions. Crews from Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Poland all had a sniff of the title with Menzies and Lee Rush stranded near the back.
What followed was the sort of run that wins championships. The pair worked their way back through the fleet, then made a decisive call on the final downwind leg, peeling away from the conventional route to find pressure on the right hand side of the course. A clean gybe set at the bottom mark sealed the recovery. Fifth place was good enough. The world title was theirs.
“I don’t have words, that’s for sure,” Menzies told Sail-World after the finish. “It’s amazing. I couldn’t ask for anything more from this week.”
Lee Rush, his crew at the front of the boat, said the comeback had hinged entirely on the last leg. “We managed to get back just on the last downwind, and that was enough to do it. We’re super stoked,” he said.
The defending champions Bart Lambriex and Floris van de Werken of the Netherlands had to settle for silver, denied a fourth consecutive 49er world crown. Meggendorfer and Spranger took bronze for Germany, with Austria fourth and Poland fifth in a startlingly compressed leaderboard where only 15 points covered the entire top ten heading into the medal races.
The build to this title has been quietly relentless. Menzies and Lee Rush won the 49er European Championship in Greece last year and have been moving through the world rankings ever since. They opened this campaign with a flying first day in Quiberon, lost the lead briefly mid regatta, then ground their way back into top spot by the end of qualifying. Their day five performance was uneven by their own admission, with Menzies telling the day five Yachting New Zealand report that the pair had “started every race really poorly”. The fact they still came out of it with a world title says everything about their nerve in the boat.
Their result is the high point of a strong week for the New Zealand fleet at Quiberon. Fellow Kiwis Mattias Coutts and Oscar Gunn won the final gold fleet race to finish 20th overall. New Zealand has now produced 49er world champions across multiple generations, a class in which Peter Burling and Blair Tuke set the modern benchmark with four consecutive world titles between 2013 and 2016 before winning Olympic gold in Rio.
The next horizon is Los Angeles 2028. The 49er remains the men’s skiff event at the Olympic Games, and Menzies and Lee Rush will now go to LA as one of the boats to beat rather than the young challengers. Their main domestic rivals for the New Zealand spot will be watching closely, knowing that a world title at 21 with an Olympic cycle still to go is the strongest possible statement of intent.
There is one complication on the horizon. Menzies is already part of Emirates Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup programme, where he is being lined up as a co helm in the next cycle. Balancing an Olympic skiff campaign against the demands of a Cup defence is a delicate juggling act. Burling and Tuke did it. Menzies and Lee Rush will now have to work out their own version.
For now the trophy comes home, lifted by a pair who started this season ranked behind the men they have just beaten and finished it as the youngest world champions the 49er class has ever produced.
What do you think of the Kiwi pair’s chances at Los Angeles 2028? 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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