Tom Pansard
| Brand affiliation | F-One (per our research; specific parawing/foil models not published) |
Tips library: attributed, timestamped
“Je ne réalise pas encore, je suis tellement heureux ! C'était un peu un test, alors remporter cette compétition, c'est juste incroyable… J'ai tellement hâte de voir comment ce sport va grandir.”
leucate.fr, post-event interview after winning the first SFT Downwind Parawing World Cup, Leucate 2026 (verbatim from named text source; translation: "I can't quite believe it, I'm so happy! It was a bit of a test, so winning this competition is just incredible… I can't wait to see how this sport will grow.")
All riders we track → Downwind glide technique → SFT Lake Garda 2026 results
Who won the first parawing world cup race ever run? That trivia question now has a permanent answer: Tom Pansard, 17, from Marseille, men’s champion of the inaugural SFT Downwind Parawing World Cup stage at Leucate, Mondial du Vent, April 2026. Among the riders we track, he leads the youth wave of the competitive racer tier.
The Leucate win
The Leucate stage (April 22–26, 2026) was the first sanctioned parawing world-cup racing ever held, with a men’s fleet of 30 and a signature “race with a beach finish”: riders crossing the line at full speed on the sand. Pansard won the men’s division ahead of Bastien Escofet and Alan Fedit, both established French foil racers. Open-division winner at the discipline’s first-ever stage, at 17. That line stays on a palmarès for a career.
His reaction, verbatim from leucate.fr: “Je ne réalise pas encore, je suis tellement heureux ! C’était un peu un test, alors remporter cette compétition, c’est juste incroyable… J’ai tellement hâte de voir comment ce sport va grandir.” Translation: “I can’t quite believe it, I’m so happy! It was a bit of a test, so winning this competition is just incredible… I can’t wait to see how this sport will grow.” The “bit of a test” is the telling part. Nobody at Leucate, the winner included, had raced a parawing world cup before, and the SFT was openly adjusting formats mid-event on rider feedback.
Fourth in the 2026 rankings
He sits fourth overall in the 2026 SFT men’s Downwind Parawing ranking at the time of writing, behind Bastien Escofet, Dmitry Evseev and Sergiy Doroshenko. A Leucate win and #4 overall can coexist because of the series format: Escofet answered at Cabarete by winning 11 of 12 races, and rankings reweight after every stage. Whether Pansard hit back at Lake Garda is a question for the SFT Lake Garda 2026 results. Parawing results there hadn’t been published when this profile was last updated.
Background
Junior wingfoil racing. He came up through the GWA Youth circuit, the standard pipeline for the French riders dominating early parawing racing, and he’s listed as F-One-affiliated. That is the whole documented program: his specific parawing model, foil and board aren’t published in the sources we track, and we won’t invent a spec sheet. Leucate rewarded speed, efficiency, control and wing management across upwind, crosswind and downwind legs. A wingfoil-racing base translating directly is the least surprising part of the story.
What isn’t documented
Beyond his Instagram account, no personal channel has surfaced, no home-spot detail beyond Marseille, no quotes beyond the Leucate interview. His age (17) is as reported in the 2026 Leucate recap. For now his public record is one historic weekend plus a ranking line. Expect this page to grow with every SFT stage.