Lake Garda: the first world champions

Written from inside the fleet: the author raced this event to 4th place in the Parawing fleet and won Masters, ahead of Aljaz Valic and Maksim Pashkevskii.

Per the official protocol, Tom Pansard took the Lake Garda Parawing event over Bastien Escofet and Lou Thouin. Three races counted: one SC race and two downwind races (SC1, DW1, DW2). Manon Dupe won the women’s.

The bigger news is the titles. This stage sealed the first-ever SFT Downwind Parawing world titles. Men: 1. Bastien Escofet (FRA), 2. Dmitry Evseev (MRI), 3. Tom Pansard (FRA); women: 1. Manon Dupe (FRA). The protocol does not record equipment, so podium gear setups go in once the riders confirm them. Full results in the table above.

What our author’s pre-event footage confirms

The day before racing, on July 1 2026, our author Dmitry Evseev filmed a 50 km downwind from Navene at the north end of the lake (footage). It’s an independent first-person record, and it lines up with the event on several points:

• Garda’s signature wind. Dead against the shore, stable only 100–200 m out, then accelerating hard down-lake: the rider launched in roughly 15–20 kn and hit storm-force gusts (his own estimate near 50 kn) in the wide middle section, exactly the venue behaviour that makes Garda a forecast-driven downwind rather than an everyday one.
• Timing. Shot July 1, the eve of the parawing fleet’s first races on July 2.
• Start list corroborated. Two riders in that session, Maksim Pashkevskii and Sergiy Doroshenko, both appear in the official Garda protocol (9th and 11th), independent of the results PDF.
• What the fleet actually rode. A 4.0 m parawing on an AXIS Tempo 1090 foil (16 aspect ratio, 745 cm²), an 80 cm mast and a 6 ft mid-length board, with 1.9–4.3 m² the size spread across the three riders in the strong wind: a concrete snapshot of parawing gear in race-week conditions, which the protocol itself does not record.

We treat the footage as venue and start-list corroboration from the author himself, not as a competition result.