The Melges 24 World Championship has been contested twenty-six times since 1998, crowning champions in two divisions, Overall and Corinthian, the latter reserved for amateur crews racing under the sport's sportsmanlike, non-professional tradition. The Overall title has proven brutally hard to repeat: only four sailors have ever won it more than once, and just two of them, Carlo Fracassoli and Lorenzo Bressani, have three titles each, with only Bressani and Vince Brun managing to defend the crown in back-to-back years. Corinthian tells a different story. Niccolò Bertola alone has won it four times, more than any Overall skipper has ever managed. It is a fleet that regularly runs seventy to eighty boats deep, and it is why the 27th edition, set for Harbor Springs, Michigan, USA, from September 19 to 26, already has the sailing world paying attention.
The boat behind that statistic has a pedigree that explains a lot of the difficulty. In 1992, Buddy Melges won the America's Cup aboard America³, a boat shaped by design house Reichel/Pugh. Riding that high, Melges brought Reichel/Pugh back with a brief to build something smaller, and in December of that same year the result was tested in the snow on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It went to market in 1993 as the Melges 24, built by Melges Performance Sailboats in Zenda, Wisconsin, and within a year Sailing World Magazine had named it Boat of the Year. Effectively, sailors were being handed Cup-level design thinking in a boat they could tow home behind the family car.
That lineage is baked into how the class still races. The Melges 24 is a 7.31 metre one-design keelboat with a carbon fibre spar, rudder, bowsprit and retractable vertical keel fin, weighing 809 kilograms and typically sailed by a crew of five. Nearly 900 have been built since 1993, racing across more than 20 countries on five continents, and since 2024 the class has scrapped its crew weight limit entirely, opening the boat up to a wider spread of sailors without changing the hull.
Harbor Springs is hosting on the strength of Little Traverse Bay's reputation for tactical, tricky freshwater racing, and the club has plenty riding on the week beyond a single World Champion trophy. Alongside the Open and Corinthian titles, contested for the perpetual Melges Performance Sailboats Trophy and the Challenge Henri Samuel Corinthian World Trophy, sailors will also chase the Zerogradinord Next-Gen Trophy, the Zarko Draganic Trophy, the newly introduced Meier Trophy, and the Quantum Great Lakes Cup. It is less a single race for a single prize than a week-long accumulation of everything the class values, speed, seamanship and staying power.
The Worlds crowns champions in two divisions, Overall and Corinthian, the latter reserved for amateur crews racing under the sport's sportsmanlike, non-professional tradition. The Overall title shows just how hard it is to repeat: Lorenzo Bressani and Carlo Fracassoli dominated the 2010s between them, Bressani taking it in 2010 and 2011, Fracassoli following in 2012, then again in 2017 and 2019, and since racing resumed after the pandemic cancellations, no Overall skipper has repeated, Peter Duncan (Raza Mixta) won in 2022, Drew Freides (Pacific Yankee) in 2023, Don Wilson (Convexity) in 2024, and current champion Peter Karrie (Nefeli) in 2025. The Corinthian division tells its own story of dominance passing between two names, Niccolò Bertola a fixture through the late 2010s and into 2022, before Ante Botica has taken over as the strong hand of the early 2020s.
Thirty-eight teams from Canada, Great Britain and the United States are currently entered, with the field expected to keep growing ahead of the September 1 entry deadline. A Pre-Worlds regatta on Little Traverse Bay from August 29 to 30 gives fleets a proper look at the racecourse before the main event, and the Melges 24 U.S. National Championship, running August 14 to 16 with close to 40 boats on the line, is already serving as a form guide for who turns up sharp in September. The reigning World Champion is NEFELI GER673, sailed by Peter Karrie with Alessandro Franci, Niccolò Bianchi, Saverio Cigliano and Karlo Hmeljak, who will defend the title they won in 2025.
For a design that's now 33 years old, the Melges 24 keeps finding ways to stay current rather than lean on nostalgia. Scrapping the crew weight limit in 2024 opened the boat to a wider range of sailors without touching the hull, and this year's introduction of the Meier Trophy alongside a new headline sponsor in Gill Marine shows a class still adding to itself, not just defending old ground.
The class's own retrospective, Join the Melges 24 Fleet, celebrating 30 years of racing, traces the boat from that snowy 1992 test on Lake Geneva through three decades of world championship racing.
