Rachael Betschart sailed her Waszp high above the Italian lakes to finish top female and second overall at the 2026 EuroCup in Imperia.

Betschart, who won a regatta in the EuroCup series in Germany in May, took on sailors from France, Italy and Germany at the event, in which she won two of the six races and finished on nine points, just two behind local champion Giuseppe Chiantera.

The 20-year-old has mixed emotions about her performance after making a number of mistakes that she feel impacted her results.

“I don’t want to say I’m disappointed by winning the female division and coming second overall in Italy,” Betschart said.

“I’m happy I came second, I had a good event and I learnt a lot. I did want to win but everything that happened during the event I learnt from, so I don’t have regrets on anything.

“But on the second day I lost it just because I made silly mistakes that I know I could have fixed. Hindsight's 20/20, but they were silly mistakes and it happened twice.

“It happened in the first race and the second race but in the third I was finally able to fix it. There were definitely things that went wrong, but I also had really good moments and I’ll go back, see where I went wrong and hopefully for the future I can fix it.

“I’m not disappointed with how I finished, but let’s just say it makes me hungrier for the future.”

Betschart competes in one of the few sports in which women take on men on equal terms, with recent modifications to the rules levelling the playing field for female competitors.

“There has been quite the debate over this in the past couple of years,” Betschart said.

“Last year they brought in this new sail, the 7.5, which is a smaller rig and makes it more manageable for lighter-weight people because the 8.2 made it hard to compete with people who are heavier.

“But the 7.5 evens out the playing field between men and women, because it's geared towards a certain weight range. As long as you're in that weight range, you’re able to compete, no matter whether you’re a man or a woman.

“In the event that I just finished, out of the top three, two of them were female, which I think just goes to show that it makes it a lot more achievable for women to compete with men.”

Betschart combines competing occasionally on the EuroCup circuit with her mechanical engineering studies at Exeter University in the UK and says some of her fellow students find it hard to comprehend her ability to do both.

“I get asked how I manage to do it all the time at school,” Betschart said.

“But I think it makes me more motivated with my studies. I was explaining to my friend earlier, because she was asking me how I stay so motivated and so disciplined, that university equals sailing for me.

“If I don’t do well in university, sailing won’t happen but if I do well sailing will happen. So it’s really important for me to either get ahead or stay on top of my studies and sacrifice some free time to catch up, or when I’m overseas in the evenings I will be doing schoolwork or I’ll get up early and do schoolwork before I go out training or sailing.

“It’s just about finding a balance between everything that I have my focus on.”

Betschart is using the EuroCup series of races to keep her eye in as she prepares for some of her sport’s biggest races in 2027.

“The dates have not been confirmed yet but my big target is the Waszp Games in Italy in July, so I am working towards that.”