The 2025 Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race will go down in history with its winner on corrected time, Min River, breaking two records on the way to her ultimate triumph.
Min River is the first double-handed yacht to win the prestigious Tattersall Cup, which is awarded to the overall race winner, and is also the first winning entry to be skippered by a woman, with Chinese-Australian owner Jiang Lin at the helm.
Lin, the 2024-25 Cruising Yacht Club of Australia (CYCA) Female Ocean Racer of the Year, co-skippered Min River with Frenchman Alexis Loison.
“I can’t believe it. It’s wonderful. I hope it will encourage more women to try. You never know what can happen,” said Lin, who has lived in Sydney since October 2023 and named her boat after the river in China that flows through Fujian province, where her parents lived.
“I never dreamed of winning it (on corrected time), but my ambition was that if we could win the (double-handed) division, that would be nice. That was my goal,” she told reporters.
Jiang Lin co-skippered with Frenchman Alexis Loison. (Cruising Yacht Club of Australia)
However, behind the excitement, there was a lament that the outcome was ultimately decided on land, following a protest.
No one felt the disappointment more than Michel Quintin and Yann Rigal aboard the New Caledonian boat BNC-myNet/Léon, earlier the ‘winner in waiting’ after being the first double-handed finisher whose hopes were undone by the protest.
The protest against BNC was for a breach of Racing Rule of Sailing 55.3, relating to sail sheeting. It was initially lodged with the race committee by the Min River team on Tuesday. But then they withdrew the protest on Wednesday before it was due to be heard by an International Jury at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania at 9 a.m. (AEDT).
By that time, Quintin and Rigal had seen images of the breach overnight, realized their error and admitted it to the race committee, maintaining the breach was unintentional and that they were unaware of the specific rule.
The breach occurred on the River Derwent with less than two nautical miles remaining in the 628-nautical-mile race — agonizingly close.
Their admission obligated race committee chair Lee Goddard to lodge a protest on behalf of the committee against BNC. The protest was heard at 9:30 a.m. (AEDT) and upheld.
After the one-hour hearing, the international jury imposed a discretionary penalty of one hour and five minutes onto BNC’s elapsed time.
With the penalty, BNC still held first place in the double-handed line honours division. But on corrected time, the time penalty relegated them from first overall to second, and elevated Min River, previously 54 minutes behind BNC on corrected time, from second to first place.
Min River’s official corrected winning time for the Tattersall Cup is now four days, one hour, 56 minutes, nine seconds. BNC’s revised corrected time with the penalty is four days, two hours, nine minutes, 45 seconds. Third place on corrected time went to Simon Kurts’ fully crewed 47-footer Love & War (four days, two hours, thirty minutes, 58 seconds).
Overall results for the Tattersall Cup are based on International Rating Certificate (IRC) corrected time, calculated using a mathematical handicap designed to offset the advantage of larger, faster yachts, such as the 100-footers that are most favored for line honors and the John H. Illingworth Trophy, against smaller, slower boats like BNC.
After the hearing, Goddard explained BNC’s breach to the media, saying the crew had: “Set and used an asymmetric spinnaker with the tack connected to the bowsprit and a spar connected to the sheet at one end and the mast at the other.
“This configuration exerted outward pressure on the sheet at a point where, if the boat were upright, a vertical line would fall outside the deck. Under the rules, that setup is not permitted, and therefore, the rule was broken.
“That penalty is absolutely proportionate. They used their spinnaker inappropriately — not deliberately, but it was photographed.”
Despite their disappointment, Quintin and Rigal, who were welcomed amid cheers at the Hobart docks on Tuesday by family and friends, sportingly accepted the verdict.
“The decision was difficult (to hear). But it’s sport, it’s life, and we respect the decision of the International Jury,” Quintin, a two-time world champion and 1988 Olympic windsurfer, told reporters.
“We thought maybe we could receive a smaller penalty, but that was the jury’s choice.
“We lose the race for almost nothing, but we are really happy with our race. We feel we did something really special in this race.”
Min River is the first double-handed yacht to win the prestigious overall race. (Salty Dingo / CYCA)
Quintin opted to focus on the positives that he and Rigal will take from the 80th edition of the Sydney Hobart, aside from being the first double-handed boat to finish.
“It’s a beautiful story. We came from nowhere, nobody really knew us, and we arrived here with our families at an international event, racing double-handed,” he said.
“It’s new for this race. It’s only the fifth edition allowing double-handed entries, and for a double-handed boat to win overall, even if it’s not us in the final result, is historic.”
Quintin said he and Rigal did not hesitate to admit the breach after realizing it.
“We didn’t fully understand the rule, so we called an expert jury in France who explained it,” he said. “Once we realized the situation, it was already too late to make a declaration. So this morning, the race committee asked us if we intended to declare that we had broken a rule, and we accepted straight away.”
Quintin also praised the Min River team for lodging the initial protest, saying the images could otherwise have led to an even more awkward outcome.
“It was a very good protest. Otherwise, the ceremony could have gone ahead and the trophy might have had to be taken back,” he said. “That’s not good for anyone — the race, the organization, or the competitors. It’s a hard moment, but now everything is clear and clean.”
