Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron sailor Josh Hyde spent almost the entire 59th Governor’s Cup looking like the man to beat. He topped every scoreboard from the first morning of racing off Newport Beach, California, right through to the end of the round robin stage. Then, in the semi-finals, it slipped away from him.
The Governor’s Cup, hosted by the Balboa Yacht Club, is the oldest youth match racing championship in the world, run every year since the late 1960s for sailors under 23. This year’s 12-boat fleet raced identical Governor’s Cup 22 sloops off the Southern California coast from July 27 to August 1, with Hyde one of three sailors going in as a top-ranked Under-23 skipper on the world rankings, alongside fellow New Zealander Ethan Fong and Australia’s Daniel Kemp.
Hyde didn’t hang about proving it. He went 8-0 on the opening day in 6 to 7 knots, picking up wins over reigning Youth Match Racing World Champion Morgan Pinckney and countryman Sam Scott, also of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, along the way. James Hayhoe of Australia clawed level with him on day two, both locked on 12 wins apiece, but Hyde hit back on day three, going 4-1 to open up a two-point buffer with the round robin drawing to a close.
By the time the double round robin wrapped up on day four, Hyde had banked 17 wins from his 22 matches, enough to finish top of the table outright. Scott, despite sitting in a share of second place that morning, had a rough final day and missed the cut altogether. Pinckney, meanwhile, came from well back in the pack, winning his last two round robin matches to sneak into the fourth and final semi-final berth on a tiebreak, alongside Hayhoe and Siena Nichols of host club Balboa YC.
As round robin winner, Hyde got first pick of opponent for the semis and chose Nichols, leaving Hayhoe to face Pinckney. It looked like the right call. Hyde raced out to a 2-0 lead in the semi-final, needing just one more win to reach the final. Nichols, at 17 the youngest skipper in the fleet, had other ideas. She and her crew clawed back three straight races to steal the match 3-2, ending Hyde’s title bid at the last hurdle after a week in which he’d barely put a foot wrong.
Pinckney made short work of Hayhoe in the other semi-final, winning 3-1, and went on to beat Nichols 3-0 in the final, the first all-Newport Beach decider most observers can recall in the modern era of the event. It capped an extraordinary turnaround for the 21-year-old, who’d been written off with just 11 points and two races to go in the round robin. The win made Pinckney only the second American sailor to complete the youth match racing “Triple Crown”, claiming the Rose Cup, the Youth Worlds and the Governor’s Cup all in the same campaign. The first to do it, Jeffrey Petersen, was sitting on the GovCup TV commentary desk to watch it happen, and summed it up simply: Pinckney had come from deep to win it with sheer determination and poise.
For Hyde, there’s no silver lining in the results sheet, only in the manner of the campaign. Topping a 12-boat round robin outright against a fleet that included a reigning world champion is no small thing, and Boating NZ flagged him back in April as one of the three sailors most likely to define this year’s regatta. He did exactly that for four days straight. It’s the sort of near-miss that tends to sting for a while, but if the pattern of Governor’s Cup semi-finalists going on to bigger things holds, Hyde’s name won’t be a stranger to this event’s alumni list, which already carries the likes of Phil Robertson and Nick Egnot-Johnson among its New Zealand contingent.
