MASTER´S CUP
In order to allow sailors no longer campaigning for the Olympics or for World Championships to keep on competing at international level, the 470 Internationale created the Master’s World Championship in 1983, whose first event was held at Valencia in Spain. Held each year, this championship became the World Master’s Cup in 1998, then at the request of ISAF, the Master’s Cup in 2000.
Initially the event was reserved for crews having a total combined age of seventy years, with the helm being at least thirty-five years old at the end of the year of the championship. From 1996, the first ‘Grandmaster’ in the results was distinguished by a special prize. To be Grandmaster, the crew had to have a combined age of one hundred years, with the helm having attained at least fifty years old. Then from the 2000 edition, a new ‘Apprentice Masters’ category was created for crews totalling more than sixty years, with the helm being at least thirty years old.
As for the first Grandmaster, the first Apprentice Master was awarded a special prize. A new format was introduced in 2009, creating separate results for each category. From 2011 the ‘Grand-Grandmasters’ category was added for crews totalling more than one hundred and twenty years at the end of the year of the championship. Additionally, the helm age criterion was removed, in accordance with the Class Rules which do not distinguish the helm but which present the 470 as a boat with two crew members.
The helm age criterion was re-established in 2022. This had a notable effect for Germans Uti & Frank Thieme, who won the overall ranking all categories in 2022 competing in the Masters category, while they had competed in the Grandmasters category in the two previous years.
- The Swiss crew Martin Steiger & Hans Vonmoos were crowned the best Grandmasters five times in the 2000s, then won the Grand-Grandmaster category in 2011 and 2012.
- The French Gilles Chapelin & Frank Barthe won the Grandmasters category four times.
- The Spaniards Angel Gutierrez & Antonio Plaza Reyes won the Masters World Championship three times overall.
- The Frenchman Bernard Boime has won four times in Masters (1995, 2001, 2009 and 2010), of which three were with Gilles Espinasse, before winning together the Grandmasters in 2012 and the Grand-Grandmasters in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Over the 2013-2024 period, other multiple winners were:
- The Germans Uti & Frank Thieme: five times in Masters and twice in Grandmasters.
- The Germans Joachim & Stefan Oetken: twice in Grandmasters and once in Grand-Grandmasters.
- The Dutch Benny & Jan Kouwenhoven: Four times in Grandmasters.
The event has only been won twice by non-European crews, once by the women crew Jenni Danks & Addy Bucek (Australia) who won all the races in Auckland in 1999, and by the Apprentice masters crew of Paul Foerster & Bob Merrick (USA) in 2000 in Saint-Pierre Quiberon (France) who went on to win a silver medal at the Sydney Olympic Games a few weeks later.