Four decisions were made on the penultimate day of the 134th Travemünde Week: In addition to the ranking regattas of the Kielzugvögel and Korsar, it was the title fights in the J/22 and Olympiajolle that attracted the most attention. The race committee of the Zürcher Yacht-Club (ZYC) started the day with great ambition to get many more races on the list for the J/22 World Championship. And three more races succeeded. “We would have liked to start a fourth, but the time limit put limits on us. We were only a few minutes short of being able to start another race,” reported Lionel Büttner from ZYC. However, this would not have changed anything about the World title—the multinational team under the Dutch flag of Jean-Michel Lautier was superior. The new J/22 World Champions had to wait a long time before they could hold the winner’s trophy in their hands. A protest hearing put the award ceremony on hold. Jean-Michel Lautier, Giuseppe D’Aquino and Denis Neves seized the opportunity. The trio dived into the sailors’ village at the Marinepool store to convert the 300-euro prize money from Friday’s Trave Race into shirts and shorts. Shortly afterwards, they were celebrated by the 26 crews as World Champions. The winning crew itself significantly increased the number of nations represented. The trio is a multinational team. Skipper Lautier (47) is French, trimmer D’Aquino (56) is Italian and bowman Neves (47) is Portuguese. The boat name Fraporita is also derived from the national abbreviations. But that is not enough of the cosmopolitan appearance. “We all sail under the Dutch flag,” Lautier explained. The background: The trio lives in Amsterdam and The Hague, as engineers they all work for the European Space Agency ESA. Formerly competitors, they have now been sailing together for 12 years. And with success—World Championship silver in 2015 in Travemünde was followed by another second place, then the title in Warnemünde in 2019 and now gold again. “They are really good,” praises Holger Schmitt. The man from Duisburg is the head of the German fleet and felt he was in good hands with the J-family in Travemünde: “A great World Cup, with very nice races. We’d love to come again.” Silver went to the crew of Jürgen Eiermann (Rastatt) and bronze to Wolf Jeschonnek (Berlin). For full details, visit https://www.travemuender-woche.com/.