Ian Williams leads World Match Race

Britain's Ian Williams had already ensured he continued to lead the World Match Racing Tour just by making it to the semi-finals but he was gunning for back-to-back wins in St. Moritz today.

He was made to wait until tomorrow to contest his best-of-three against New Zealand's Adam Minoprio as the soggy and unreliable conditions for which the lake, surrounded by wooded mountains at 6,000 feet above sea level, is notorius.

Listen to Stuart Alexander talk to Ian Williams about spreading his wings

Williams, with crew Gerry Mitchell and Richard Sydenham joined by brother Mark to replace the injured Mark Nicholls was coming off the back of a win in Denmark last time out and, though America's Cup ambitions are, like everyone else's, not even threatening the back burner, he hopes to add a couple of Volvo Ocean Race legs to his cv over the next 10 months. He has been test driving with Team Russia.

Such was Minoprio's self-belief that he had booked to fly out of Switzerland today before the competition will have ended, but his crew, like himself all graduates of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron youth programme, dismissed the Williams threat as posing no problem on the way to the final. Tomorrow will tell.

In the other all-French semi-final Philippe Presti and Mathieu Richard managed one race, with Richard, currently number one in the world rankings - which take no account of absence by others racing in other areas of competition - scoring an easy win.

Earlier, Williams had seen off, to the disappointment of the grandstand spectators, his Swiss quarter-final opponent, Eric Monnin. Going into the best of three, Williams was one down from the night before, but the vagaries of the streaky breeze down the lake went his way as he pulled steadily away to square the match and was in the controlling position when he held Monnin outside the finish line to win the second and the match.

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