The New York Yacht Club won its Morgan Cup Team Race for the first time in more than a decade Sunday, taking the best-of-five final against Larchmont Yacht Club at Harbour Court.
Team captain Pete Levesque was part of the club’s last winning crew in 2015 and has sailed every edition since.
“It’s been a long time since New York has won, so it feels really good to have this group of sailors experience that,” Levesque said dockside after the win.
The regatta ran Aug. 7-9 and used two full round robins plus a third with the fleet split into gold and silver divisions. New York and Larchmont finished deadlocked atop the standings at 16-7. In the final, New York led two races to one when a Larchmont boat drew a foul in the pre-start of the fourth race and had to complete a 720-degree penalty turn while the rest of the fleet sailed up the course.
Defending champion Corinthian Yacht Club of Marblehead, Mass., finished third at 15-8. Newport Harbor Yacht Club of Newport Beach, Calif., was fourth at 13-10.
The competition was tighter than in recent years. Both finalists dropped seven races in the round-robin rounds, compared with three to five losses for winning teams over the previous three seasons.
Levesque credited his team’s familiarity with each other and with the conditions — light air Sunday, complicated by the chop from powerboat traffic in and out of Newport Harbor. “We joked that we had a lot of practices in really terrible conditions,” he said, “so we were ready for the waves and the chop and the light air.”
Thirteen sailors accepted the trophy, but Levesque pointed to the more than 300 club members involved in team racing. “It’s nice to validate the efforts and come home with the win, defend the home turf,” he said.
The Morgan Cup is one of several adult team races the New York Yacht Club runs at Harbour Court each August using its fleet of 22 Sonar keelboats. The series began with the Hinman Masters Trophy in 2000, followed by the all-ages Morgan Cup in 2003, the Grandmasters in 2010 and the Great Grandmasters, added in 2025.
The Hinman Masters Team Race runs Aug. 14-16, followed by the inaugural Women’s International Championship and the Resolute Cup.
Winning team: Pete Levesque (skipper and team captain), Ben Kinney, Grace Kinney, Josh Dochoda, Jack Parkin (skipper), James Westerberg, Taylor Kirkpatrick, George Sidamon-Eristoff, Patrick Shanahan (skipper), John Mastrandrea, Julia Reynolds, Caroline Levesque and Ann Sheridan.
