Lance Fraser earned a place on the podium at last weekend’s York Cup regatta hosted by the Royal Canadian Yacht Club.

The Bermuda match race sailor finished third after beating Canadian rival Landon Gardner 2-0 in the Petit Final contested in Toronto Harbour.

Fraser’s victory over Gardner avenged an earlier loss to the Canadian during the round-robin stage. Fraser and his Team Digicel Business Match Racing team-mates scraped through to the semi-finals with a 4/4 record after prevailing against Magnus Sanberg, of Sweden, in their final round-robin race.

But any hopes Fraser had of winning the grade 3 regatta were effectively dashed when the race committee opted to go straight to the final and Petite Final rather than contest the semi-finals because of the considerable time lost the previous day to lack of wind.

However, Fraser and his team-mates made the most of the situation by winning the Petite Final to earn a place on the podium.

“In good pressure, the team sailed extremely well in the Petite Final,” Fraser said. “We were lucky enough to sail extremely well when we needed to in order to finish on the podium.”

Fraser’s podium display went some way towards compensating for an indifferent regatta.

“Overall, our weekend was full of inconsistency,” he said. “At times we were sailing at one hundred per cent and controlling our entire races, and at others we could not get out of our own way on the course.”

Fraser’s latest showing enabled him to climb further in the ISAF match race rankings from 57th to 52nd — his highest yet.

“We are very happy about that,” he said. “We’ve been moving up the ranking for the last few years after starting at about 1,200. Last year we broke the top 100 and have been slowly moving up the list and it is much harder to move up the list once you are in the top 100.”

Terry McLaughlin, of Canada, won last weekend’s regatta after besting David Niemann, of USA, 3-0 in the final.

n Olympian Peter Bromby will be among those taking part in the Nantucket Race Week International One Design Celebrity Invitational to be held today and tomorrow in Nantucket Sound.

The unique offshore regatta, consisting of eight races, pairs 14 visiting and local teams with 14 of America’s top sailing tacticians. One completed race will constitute a regatta with teams permitted to discard their worst score after the fifth race.

Among those competing with three-times IOD world champion Bromby are America’s Cup winning tactician Gary Jobson, Rolex Yachtsman of the Year Jud Smith and multiple Olympic medallist Mark Reynolds.