Bastien Escofet

The first-ever season of sanctioned parawing racing already has a man to beat, and it’s Bastien Escofet. The French GONG team rider won the SFT Downwind Parawing World Cup stage in Cabarete, Dominican Republic (June 17–21, 2026), taking 11 of the 12 races, and as of mid-2026 he leads the overall men’s ranking of the inaugural 2026 SFT Downwind Parawing World Cup season.

From wingfoil racing to the front of the fleet

Escofet took the same road into parawinging as most of the current racing elite: French wingfoil and foil racing. You can read that background straight off his 2026 season. The sport’s very first World Cup stage was Leucate, France, during the Mondial du Vent (April 22–26, 2026). There he finished 2nd in the men’s division behind 17-year-old Tom Pansard, in a field of 30 men. Two months later in Cabarete he settled the question.

The Cabarete win

Cabarete was the tour’s first Caribbean stop, run in partnership with Cabarete Wing Fest, with a total prize purse of $3,000, a number that tells you how young and lightly professionalized parawing racing still is. Escofet’s win there comes confirmed through his sponsor GONG, which reported he won 11 out of 12 races and called the result “a victory built on consistency, speed, and a perfect mastery of the Dominican conditions.” In a hybrid-format series (upwind, crosswind and downwind legs, judged on speed, efficiency, control and wing management), 11 of 12 is about as dominant as a stage win gets.

Caveat: as of early July 2026 the SFT had not published a full Cabarete recap, so the rest of that podium (men’s 2nd and 3rd, the women’s results) remains unconfirmed in public sources. Escofet’s win is the one result from that event with a named source behind it.

Where he stands in 2026

Per the SFT rankings, the 2026 overall men’s Downwind Parawing standings after Leucate and Cabarete: 1. Bastien Escofet (FRA), 2. Dmitry Evseev (Mauritius), 3. Sergiy Doroshenko (UA), 4. Tom Pansard (FRA). Pansard, the Leucate winner, beat him head-to-head at the first stage, which makes Escofet–Pansard the defining rivalry of the discipline’s first competitive season. The tour’s next stop after Cabarete was the Lake Garda stage at Foiling Week (July 2–5, 2026).

Gear

Escofet races GONG Lowkite parawings. That is where the documented setup ends: board volume, foil choice and sizes are not published, and guessing helps nobody. For context, racers at Leucate ran front wings anywhere from 700–750 cm² at the fast end up to 900–1000 cm².

What’s not documented

The gaps, listed so you don’t have to wonder: Escofet’s age, home spot, exact wingfoil racing palmarès before parawing, and his social channels. No direct quotes from Escofet himself have surfaced in the sources we track. The only attributed statement about his racing comes from GONG. As the SFT season continues and the sport’s media (LabRat Foiler, Foil Life, Up On Foil) catch up with its new champion-elect, this profile will be updated.