THE MAXI YACHT ROLEX CUP

The Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup is six days of racing in early September for yachts of sixty feet and more, off Porto Cervo on the Costa Smeralda of Sardinia: coastal races of fifteen to thirty-five miles among the islands of the La Maddalena Archipelago and through the strait called Bomb Alley, with windward and leeward courses between them, in six classes from the supermaxis to the multihulls. It is given by the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda with the International Maxi Association, and has been the flagship of the maxi yachts’ year since 1980.

Guy Barron has raced in Sardinia thirty-four times since 1987. Of one of them he says: “We hit a rock going 9.5 knots.”

The Aga Khan's Coast

In the late 1950s an English financier, John Duncan Miller, told the Aga Khan of the beauty of Gallura. A letter of intent followed in 1961, and on 14 March 1962 the Consorzio Costa Smeralda was founded at Olbia by six men: the Aga Khan, Patrick Guinness, Felix Bigio, Miller, André Ardoin and René Podbielski. That year some eighteen hundred hectares passed to them from the local families, the Azara and the Orecchioni.

Porto Cervo was built as the centre of the new coast, designed by architects who included Jacques Couëlle, Luigi Vietti and Michele Busiri Vici. On 12 May 1967 the Aga Khan founded the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda there with André Ardoin, Giuseppe Kerry Mentasti and Luigi Vietti, as “a non-profit making sporting association for fellow sailing enthusiasts”.

The club began the Settimana delle Bocche in 1972, held the One Ton Cup in 1973 and the first Sardinia Cup in 1978. In 1980 it established two world championships, one for maxi yachts and one for Swans. It challenged for the America’s Cup at Newport in 1983 with Azzurra, which came third, held the first Twelve Metre World Championship in 1984, and was Challenger of Record for the Cup of 1987.

Rolex came to the maxi racing in September 1985, in a partnership that is one of the oldest on the yachting calendar. Princess Zahra Aga Khan is the club’s president, and since 2026 a Perpetual Trophy has been raced for in memory of the Aga Khan IV.

Bomb Alley

The boats arrive at the weekend to be measured and registered. The skippers are briefed on the Sunday, with a welcome cocktail, and the racing runs from the Monday to the Saturday, with a lay day in the middle that becomes a day for re-sails if the weather has taken one.

The classes are Maxi 1, Maxi Grand Prix, Maxi 3, Maxi 4, Maxi 5 and Multihull, rated under IRC, the supermaxis under ORCsy and the multihulls under ORCmh. The classes that carry a world championship sail three days of coastal racing in the archipelago and two of windward and leeward; the others sail coastal courses each day. The coastal courses go round the islands of Caprera and La Maddalena and through Bomb Alley, the rock-strewn passage north of Porto Cervo, where the J Class yachts tack “seemingly within touching distance of the shore”.

The clubhouse stands at the new marina, across the bay from the village. Ashore there is the IMA Members’ Dinner, the Rolex Gala Dinner on the club’s terrace, the Crew Party, and the prize-giving in Piazza Azzurra on the last evening.

In 2026, the thirty-sixth edition, from 6 to 12 September, the wind ran from light airs to Mistral gusts of more than twenty-eight knots. Leopard 3, Joost Schuijff’s Farr 100, won the Maxi 1 World Championship for the second time, having won the first in 2024, and Peter Dubens’s Northstar III went unbeaten in the Maxi Grand Prix and had the title won with a day to spare.

What to Know

It runs from a Sunday to a Saturday in the first half of September. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

No tickets are published. The boats lie at the club’s docks, which fill with admirers, and the dinners and the Crew Party are for owners, crews and members of the International Maxi Association.

Yachting attire: sailing clothes on the water, and a blazer on the terrace and in the piazza. Nothing is published for the regatta or the club. For the Rolex Gala Dinner, should a member be asked, the host gives the code.

Olbia Costa Smeralda airport is some thirty kilometres away, about half an hour by road. The marina has seven hundred berths, a hundred of them for the largest yachts. Stay at the Pitrizza, the Romazzino or the Cala di Volpe, which appears in The Spy Who Loved Me.

The mistake is to give the racing a single day. The Mistral can stop it altogether, and one year the Saturday proved entirely unsailable.

The Court

The Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup is not the Court’s own. A place on a boat following the fleet through Bomb Alley, and a table on the club’s terrace, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay on the Costa Smeralda, and the table afterward. The Court is at Saint-Tropez at the end of the month for Les Voiles.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.