French crew stripped of Sydney to Hobart victory as new overall winner named

They were greeted in Hobart with a bottle of champagne, ready to be declared overall winners by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia.

But 24 hours later, the French crew on board BNC - my:: NET / Leon had far less to celebrate. Their hopes of lifting the revered Tattersall Cup for the Sydney to Hobart had vanished when another yacht lodged a complaint against them for breaking race rules.

That yacht, Min River, sailed by Jiang Lin and Alexis Loison, is the first double-handed yacht, and Lin is the first female skipper, to win the race’s overall title.

The overall winner is determined by a complicated handicap system designed to allow smaller boats to compete with their much larger rivals.

“I can’t believe it,” Lin, one of 14 female owners or skippers in the 129 entries this year, said on Wednesday morning. “It will encourage more women I hope ... Look at me, if I can do it, surely you can.”

Master Lock Comanche took line honours in the 80th Sydney to Hobart on Sunday in conditions that forced more yachts to retire than the catastrophic weather of last year.

BNC - my:: NET / Leon arrived at Constitution Dock in Hobart on Tuesday afternoon as the overall race leader and first in the double-handed division. The French crew – Michael Quintin and Yann Rigal – were greeted with champagne and met by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia commodore Sam Haynes, who also won the race overall in 2024.

Second in the division and second in the overall standings, Min River arrived at the dock about 54 minutes (with the handicap applied) behind BNC’s time. Min River’s sailors made the protest after participants from other boats had approached them.

A protest is made when it is believed a yacht has not adhered to race rules.

The protest was lodged due to concerns about sheeting sails. The rules state that sails cannot be put over or through any device that means they extend beyond the width of the boat, except in some circumstances. The rule is designed to stop sailors from getting an unfair advantage.

“Some other boats approached us. We were so busy doing other things,” Lin said. “We looked at it, and yeah, it’s a clear rule broken.

“So to me, it’s not like they did something against my boat, it’s something that will have [an] effect on the whole fleet, so we thought that’s quite important.”

On Wednesday morning, race committee chairman Lee Goddard also launched a protest against BNC on behalf of the committee. At 9am the BNC crew conceded their breach.

The protest was heard by an international jury convened in the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania in Hobart at 9.30am. The jury upheld the race committee’s protest and imposed a time penalty of one hour and five minutes to BNC, leaving Min River the overall race winner.

The jury acknowledged the breach was not intentional, but found that for the last two nautical miles, BNC had used its asymmetric spinnaker connected to a spar, which meant the sail was beyond the boat’s hull or deck.

“The sailing instructions are very clear about what the rules are, and if a rule is actually breached,” Goddard said after the hearing. “And in this case, Leon actually declared themselves that they had broken a rule, and therefore the international jury simply had to confirm that rule had been broken, and then applied an appropriate penalty in consideration.

“And that penalty, I think, is absolutely proportional.”

For Min River’s Loison, the news was bittersweet.

“It’s not a very nice jury decision,” he said. “I know how Yann and Michael pushed hard during the race, but that’s life. [For] 10 years I’ve spent more Christmases with Michael than with my family, so we are very good friends.”

After the jury decision, the BNC crew spoke to the media.

“We made a mistake in the two last nautical miles before the finishing line of a 636 nautical-mile race,” Quintin said. “We didn’t know we were breaking a rule as we didn’t know this rule.

“The decision was difficult to listen [to], but it’s sport, it’s life. We respect the decision of the international jury. We thought we could manage to have a smaller penalty, but that’s the choice. We lose the race for just nothing, but we are really happy [with] our race.”

The duo confirmed they would not appeal the decision.

Min River is the first double-handed yacht to win the race overall. The division for boats sailed by two people was added in 2021 and made eligible to win the Tattersall Cup in 2022.

Lin invited Loison to race with her in the Sydney to Hobart years ago, but the pair only linked up this year.

“We only had two weeks to prepare for this race,” Lin said. “It was a rush and we had to do the qualifying passage as well, so we didn’t really have much time to prepare together as a team.

“[We] never dreamed of winning it.”