Black Foils return to podium as Australia wins Halifax SailGP Group A opener

Australia's Flying Roos announced themselves at the 2026 SailGP Halifax event with a dominant Group A victory, working through an abandoned race and shifting harbour winds to claim the win. Spain took second, and New Zealand Black Foils completed the podium in third.

Halifax marks the debut of a split-fleet format, a structure chosen to suit the particular demands of the local course. The 13-boat field has been divided into Group A, featuring Australia, France, Spain, Denmark, New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil, and Group B, comprising Emirates GBR, USA, Artemis, Germany, Red Bull Italy, and Switzerland. Each group accumulates points independently, with the top two finishers from each group progressing to Sunday's final series.

The day's racing did not unfold without difficulty. A rain cell swept across Halifax Harbour in the minutes before the original Race 1 start, and as it cleared it stripped most of the breeze with it, leaving the F50 catamarans carrying foil packages suited to the heavier conditions that had existed moments earlier. Australia had worked their way to the front of the fleet and were closing in on the finish when the clock became the problem. Falling short of the mandatory nine-minute time limit by no more than two or three seconds was enough, under SailGP rules, to invalidate the race entirely. Group A was sent back to the start line, and the Group B boats, already waiting their turn, were returned to the pit lane.

When the restart got underway the sailing was considerably cleaner, and it brought the day's most compelling storyline with it: the return of New Zealand Black Foils to competitive racing. The boat had been out of action for close to four months following a serious collision in New York, and getting three damaged boats back to race-ready condition for Halifax had demanded a monumental rebuild effort from the SailGP shore team. Peter Burling's crew showed no sign of ring rust.

From the moment the restart began, Burling kept the Black Foils locked onto Tom Slingsby's wake, rounding the first mark just 3.5 seconds behind the Flying Roos. That margin held through the second mark, reflecting the training days the New Zealand team had completed on Halifax Harbour before racing began.

The race's decisive moment came at the bottom of the course, where the breeze rotated sharply to the right. Slingsby chose the longer right-hand route, chasing the better pressure, and the gamble proved decisive. Australia got up and foiling cleanly, and by the finish line they had opened a gap of more than a minute over the rest of the fleet. Spain read the shift in much the same way, finding enough extra pressure on that final run to overhaul New Zealand and secure second place.

The Black Foils dropped to third as a result, but the quality of their performance will encourage the New Zealand camp enormously. Matching the boat speed of the fleet leaders after a four-month absence from racing points to a team very much back in contention for the remainder of the Canadian regatta.