LES VOILES DE SAINT-TROPEZ

Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez is nine days of yacht racing at the turn of September and October in the bay of Saint-Tropez: more than two hundred and fifty boats and some four thousand crew, in three fleets, the classics and the moderns racing off the Portalet tower and the maxis off Pampelonne, with each day’s racing ending in the free village of the regatta on the harbour. It is given by the Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez, and it began in 1981 as a wager between two boats.

When the first race was won, Var Matin announced: “une nouvelle America’s Cup est née”. A new America’s Cup was born.

The Nioulargue

On 29 September 1981, a Tuesday, the American Swan 44 Pride, owned by Dick Jason, challenged the 12-metre Ikra, skippered by Jean Laurain. The wager was brokered by Patrice de Colmont, who kept Club 55 on the beach at Pampelonne; as he remembered it, someone asked, “What about Ikra, do you think you could beat her?” The course was plotted on a road map: from off the Portalet tower, round the buoy on the shoal of the Nioulargue, whose name is Provençal for “nest of the sea”, and back to finish off the beach of Club 55. By one account the winner was to treat the loser to lunch at Club 55; by another the prize was a silver fruit bowl from the tableware of the French Navy, with a meal at Club 55 after. Ikra won.

The following year other boats were invited, and Bourru III was the only classic among them. The maxis came through what one history calls “Le plus grand bluff de l’histoire du yachting”, an unofficial telex to the Aga Khan, and by 1984 they were racing. The regatta kept the name of the shoal, La Nioulargue.

In 1995 the schooner Mariette and the six-metre Taos Brett IV collided fatally, and the event was suspended while the legal proceedings ran. The Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez revived it in 1999 under its present name. The founding spirit survives in a custom: “la réclamation est interdite ou associée d’une caution en liquide (de préférence du rosé frais)”. A protest is forbidden, or must be backed by a deposit in liquid, preferably chilled rosé.

Patrice de Colmont died on 11 October 2025, and 2026 was the first edition without him. His daughter Camille carries on the challenges of the Wednesday and the Thursday.

Challenge Day

The fleets arrive on the first Saturday, when the Village des Voiles opens, and the regatta is opened on the Sunday at five. On the Monday at nine the boats are blessed from the Balcon du Sube; the moderns start at eleven and the maxis at noon. The classics, the Voiliers de Tradition, some of them a hundred years old, race off the Portalet. On the Tuesday the first round of the Trophée Rolex is sailed, and the SNSM gives a sardinade in the evening. On the Wednesday the maxis rest, and there is pétanque on the place des Lices.

The Thursday is the Journée des Défis, Challenge Day, which “offers sailors the opportunity to relive what proved to be the catalyst for Les Voiles, the Club 55 Cup”. The schoolchildren parade, the Club 55 Cup starts at noon, the centenarians race at half past twelve, the challenges follow at half past one, and the crews parade at half past six.

Every class races on the Friday, and the crews have their party that night. The Trophée Rolex ends on the Saturday, with the maxis’ prize-giving at seven, and the moderns and the classics are given their prizes on the Sunday morning at eleven. The Village is free, open from nine in the morning to nine at night, with music every evening, and the sailors come ashore to it when the racing ends.

In 2026, the twenty-eighth edition under its present name, from 26 September to 4 October, some two hundred and fifty boats were entered. Fifty of them were maxis, more than had ever come; about eighty were classics, more than twenty of them centenarians; and three were J Class yachts, Hanuman, Rainbow and Svea. Svea was designed by Tore Holm in 1937 and built only in 2017, and she sailed beside his eight-metre Svanevit, the first time the two had been on the same water. On 3 October she won the J Class on a tie-break with Rainbow. “This year the class has got more competitive,” said Niklas Zennström, one of her owners, “and there was really not much in it.”

What to Know

It runs from a Saturday to the Sunday of the following week, at the end of September and the start of October, with the racing from the Monday to the Saturday. The 2027 dates have not been announced.

Watching is free. The Village is open to all, and the racing is seen from the harbour, from the coast and the beach at Pampelonne, from the shore by the Portalet, which has been improved for watching the starts, or from a boat kept clear of the courses. To race, one needs a place on a boat.

Yachting attire. Nothing is published. One guide advises comfortable shoes and a light jacket for the evening; the Court adds a blazer for the quay and the place des Lices.

There is no railway station in Saint-Tropez. The nearest is at Saint-Raphaël, an hour and a quarter away by the 7601 bus, or an hour by ferry, at €25 return. The airports are Nice and Toulon-Hyères, and the little airfield at La Môle takes private aircraft. Sea shuttles run from Sainte-Maxime and Les Issambres. The Hôtel Byblos is among the regatta’s official suppliers; rooms are taken four to six months ahead.

The mistake is to drive onto the peninsula. The traffic there is heavy, and even out of season one should expect “at least an hour in slow-moving traffic”. Come by sea, and do not miss the Thursday.

The Court

Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez is not the Court’s own. A place aboard a classic in the racing, a berth on a boat following the fleet, and a table at Club 55 on Challenge Day are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Saint-Tropez, and the table afterward. The Court’s own Mediterranean Run sets out from the same harbour in July.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.