New Zealand sailors Seb Menzies and George Lee Rush have won the 49er European Championship in Eckernförde, Germany, adding a continental crown to the world title they claimed in France in May and confirming the 21-year-olds as the dominant pairing in the Olympic men’s skiff class.
The 49er is a fast two-person dinghy sailed on the wire, one of the most physically demanding boats in Olympic sailing, and Menzies and Lee Rush have made it look almost routine over the past year. Their victory in the Baltic port town was their second major title in as many months and marked a successful defence of the European crown they first won in Thessaloniki, Greece, last year. RNZ Sport reported the win, describing it as another gold for a crew who followed up their world championship triumph with victory over the best in Europe.
The championship ran from 7 to 12 July, with the medal race sailed on the final Sunday. Menzies and Lee Rush had carried a nine point lead into the closing stages after mastering a week of light and shifty conditions on the water off Eckernförde. On the opening day of the finals series they posted race scores of four, one and two to move clear of Britain’s James Grummett and Rhos Hawes, and they held their nerve through the last races to seal the title. Boating New Zealand reported that the Kiwi pair read the tricky breeze better than anyone in the fleet during the decisive races.
What made the result all the more striking is that it was only the crew’s second international regatta of the season and their first outing since they became the youngest 49er world champions in history at Quiberon in France in May. That title came down to the closing metres of the medal race, a dramatic comeback that announced the pair as genuine contenders for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. Backing it up so quickly, against a strong European fleet and in unfamiliar Baltic conditions, suggested the world title was no fluke.
New Zealand’s strength in the class ran deeper than one boat. Fellow Kiwis Mattias Coutts and Oscar Gunn were in the hunt for a medal of their own throughout the regatta, giving the country two crews in the top three going into the finals. Coutts and Gunn had led the New Zealand charge on the opening day and stayed near the front all week, and their form meant the men’s skiff fleet was, for long stretches, a New Zealand affair at the sharp end. Coutts is the son of America’s Cup great Russell Coutts, and his progress in the class has added another familiar name to the country’s sailing pipeline.
The European Championship doubled as a gathering of the wider New Zealand squad across the three high-performance classes racing at Eckernförde, the men’s 49er, the women’s 49erFX and the mixed Nacra 17 catamaran. In the Nacra 17, Micah Wilkinson and Kate Stewart climbed to ninth overall after a strong finish, posting some of their best individual race results of the week. Speaking during the regatta, Wilkinson said the crew had simply tried to sail well in difficult circumstances. Yachting New Zealand quoted him saying, “We’ve just been trying to sail to the best of our ability all week. It’s been some challenging conditions.”
Stewart, his crew, pointed to how much the weather had swung across the week. “Today was very different conditions to the start of the regatta. We had about a maximum of six knots,” she said, describing the shift from the fresher breezes that opened the championship to the near glassy water that closed it. In the 49erFX, Nicola and Rebecca Hume were further back in the fleet at 45th, part of a younger group building experience at senior level.
For Menzies and Lee Rush, the European title continues a run that has few recent parallels in New Zealand dinghy sailing. Both came through the youth ranks, and Lee Rush has spoken in the past about how their starts and boat handling have improved with time spent racing overseas, an area they had identified as a weakness earlier in their partnership. The pair have now won the two biggest events in the class inside two months, and they sit at the top of a discipline that New Zealand has long targeted as a genuine Olympic medal prospect.
The class matters because the 49er has been a rich source of success for New Zealand at the Olympics. Peter Burling and Blair Tuke won gold at Rio in 2016 and silver at both London and Tokyo before stepping away to focus on the America’s Cup and offshore racing, leaving a gap at the top that the country has been working to fill. Menzies and Lee Rush are the clearest sign yet that the next generation is ready to carry the load, and their results this season have put them firmly in the frame for Los Angeles in 2028.
There is a long way to go before then, with two full seasons of racing, selection battles and the constant refinement that Olympic campaigns demand. But a world title and a European title in the same year, won by a crew still only 21, is the kind of platform most sailors never get to build from. New Zealand’s sailing programme has quietly assembled real depth in the skiff classes, and Eckernförde showed it off, with two Kiwi boats fighting for the podium and a third climbing the standings in the Nacra 17.
For now, the story is simply that two young New Zealanders went to Germany as world champions and left as European champions as well, having beaten the best fleet the continent could put on the water. It is a result that deserves far more attention at home than it will probably get.
What do you make of New Zealand’s growing strength in Olympic sailing, and can Menzies and Lee Rush carry this form all the way to Los Angeles in 2028? Share your thoughts 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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