Tamar Steinberg of Israel and Luuc van Opzeeland of the Netherlands are the 2026 iQFOiL world champions after a fast medal series on the final day of the Musto iQFOiL World Championships at Weymouth and Portland.
Steinberg, 20, ran the women’s championship from the first gun. She opened with four consecutive race wins, finished the qualification series in first place and carried a match point into the Grand Final. She needed one race. Sharon Kantor led at the first mark. Steinberg overtook her, banked the second match point and took the title. Kantor won silver. Australia’s Stella Bilger took bronze in her first World Championship under the Australian flag. Daniela Peleg of Israel finished fourth.
In the men’s fleet van Opzeeland won the opening Grand Final race, reached two match points and claimed the world title. American Noah Lyons, who had led the qualification standings into Saturday after back-to-back race wins on a long, light-wind Friday, took silver. Denmark’s Johan Søe won bronze on the last reach, passing France’s Nicolas Goyard in the closing metres.
First Olympic-class windsurf worlds on UK water since 2009
The championship ran from 7–12 September at the Weymouth & Portland National Sailing Academy. One hundred and eighty-six riders from 41 nations entered. Organisers billed it as the first iQFOiL World Championship hosted in the United Kingdom and the first world title event in an Olympic windsurfing discipline on UK waters since 2009.
iQFOiL is the Olympic hydrofoil windsurfing class used at Paris 2024 and confirmed for Los Angeles 2028. Boards lift on a foil and race at speeds organisers put at up to 35 knots. The format mixes qualification slaloms with a medal series that can end a title in a single final race — which is what happened to both fleets on Saturday.
Friday had been the opposite kind of day. Light, unstable breeze stretched the men’s last qualification into more than four hours of sprint slalom. Lyons topped the sheet on 49 points. Van Opzeeland sat second on 65, Søe third on 66. Steinberg led the women on 44 points from Kantor on 73.
The Olympic thread
Paris gold medallist Tom Reuveny of Israel reached the men’s semi-final stage after winning his quarter-final. He did not leave Weymouth with the world title. Van Opzeeland did. Steinberg’s week was cleaner. She never gave the fleet a session to believe the ranking would flip. Kantor’s silver still mattered: she had sat 16th after the early qualifying block and climbed to second by day four.
The class now turns toward the Los Angeles 2028 cycle with two new world champions and a UK event that proved the foil windsurfer can still fill a start list of nearly 200.