The Tribune

ELEVEN teams will decide the Star Sailors League finals on Saturday after racing was curtailed on Friday due to forecast thunderstorms.

Xavier Rohart and Pierre-Alexis Ponsot, of France, won the qualifying stages and received a bye to the semi-finals, where they will be joined by the top six boats from the 10 remaining crews who race off in the quarter-finals on Saturday morning. The best four finishers then progress to the final.

Rohart said: “The qualifications round is over, so we are halfway to our goal. We wanted to do well in the first part, and we have won it, so it’s perfect. With this format though, nothing is set; from tomorrow we all start at the same level, we have a small advantage compared to the others, but the exciting bit of this format is that anyone can win up until the last race: that’s my goal.”

The qualifiers are:

1 Xavier Rohart, Pierre-Alexis Ponsot (France) 20 points; 2 Diego Negri, Sergio Lambertenghi (Italy) 26; 3 Mateusz Kusznierewicz, Dominik Zycki (Poland) 28; 4 Hamish Pepper, Bruno Prada (New Zealand, Brazil) 32; 5 Jochen Schümann, Ingo Borkowski (Germany) 32; 6 Jean-Baptiste Bernaz, Pascal Rambeau (France) 33; 7 George Szabo, Edoardo Natucci (United States, Italy) 34; 8 Paul Cayard, Brian Sharp (United States) 48; 9 Tonci Stipanovic, Massimo Canali (Croatia, Italy) 51; 10 Ian Williams, Steve Mitchell (Britain) 52; 11 Johannes Polgar, Markus Koy (Germany) 53.