Tommaso Chieffi, tactician on the TP52 Xio, this is the eve of the ORC Worlds 2022. You were 2018 World Champions in Class A.  How are you preparing for this World Championship and what are your expectations?

We took part in the Mediterranean Championship in Sorrento with Xio, where we had very tight races with the TP52 Airis Blue, that was our main pre-Worlds training. The sails are new, the boat is well equipped to compete and our team is really strong, on board we have the Cassinari brothers, Alberto Fantini, Ciccio Celon and his son Matteo, and Ciccio Scalici. The long race that we'll be starting with will, as always, be full of unknowns, I remember a Europeans in Barcelona where we lost the long race and that conditioned the outcome of the Championship. So we're hoping to find favourable conditions. In our class there are three other TP52s, two are actually PAC52s, slightly faster than us, helmed not by owners but by professionals, they will give us a run for our money. We feel well prepared and we hope to do well.

Tommaso, you are among one of the sailors with the most experience on this Porto Cervo race course. Will that bring the team some added value?

This is certainly a unique race course, knowing the archipelago, knowing how to navigate between the islands with their wind shifts and passages close to the land can make the difference. For the first race, the long one, you have to take into account the fact that we will be going into “unexplored” territory, we'll go much further north or much further south than we are used to. So then you lose the knowledge of the course to some extent, and we'll have to interpret it as we navigate. Knowing the island, however, we have some slight advantage when navigating within the archipelago.

How do you see this great return of offshore sailing to the YCCS, after the first ever IMS Worlds in 1999?

In 1999 I was at the helm of Winterthur Yah Man, owned by Vittorio Rava, and we won the title in Group B.
At the YCCS we’re used to seeing boats like superyachts, maxis or the more professional one-design classes. It's great to see such a varied fleet here, in the past there were races like the Sardinia Cup, the Settimana delle Bocche, the selections for the Admiral's Cup. In my opinion, events of this kind are part of the history of the YCCS, so they're very welcome. As you can see from the fleet, there are 69 boats from 16 nations, iso it’s a return in great style.