Sailing: Surprise success for France Red embarrasses England and Wales

France Red, which had dominated the competition since the second day, finished the Rolex Commodores' Cup in style, pulling further ahead during yesterday's Line 7 New Zealand race. To add to the celebration, which included one of the sponsor's watches for each of the three skippers, their team captain, Gery Trentesaux, saw his Courrier Nord become the top-scoring boat of all 33 representing 11 teams. Eric Fries' Fastwave 3 shared second place for France Red.

"We were surprised, but we knew the boats were competitive, having raced them in the Solent earlier this year," said Trentesaux. "The whole team, especially Jean-Yves Le Goff's Clin d'Oeil, prefers stronger winds, so we were worried when we saw the forecast for the week's light conditions. We thought the England Red and Wales teams would be very strong and only expected to be third." Instead, it was England Red which was third behind the Netherlands and the only consolation for the fourth-placed Wales team was that Nick Hewson's Team Tonic won the battle of the big Farr 52s against Peter Harrison's Chernikeeff 2 and Kit Hobday's Bear of Britain. Even then, all three of them were beaten by the fourth big boat on parade, Peter Morton's Mandrake, sailing with some strong local talent for a hastily organised second-string Irish team. Ireland Orange was sixth, whereas the first string Ireland Green was last.

The attempt by Bruno Peyron to beat the record for sailing round Britain and Ireland failed by over an hour as the 110ft catamaran, Orange, was becalmed during the last few hours. Peyron has confirmed he will take part in the second edition of the event he founded, The Race, in 2004. He hopes to build a slightly longer, stronger, but faster version of the catamaran which he hands over to Ellen MacArthur in October.