Viola Lippitsch

Viola Lippitsch is an Austrian foil racer who took 3rd in the women’s division at the first-ever SFT Downwind Parawing World Cup in Leucate (April 2026) and sits 3rd in the 2026 overall women’s Downwind Parawing ranking. Add a 6th in SFT pump foil women and you get a foil-first skill set that transfers directly to parawing racing.

The record so far

Per the SFT rankings and the Leucate recap:

Leucate was the first sanctioned parawing World Cup stage ever held, run inside the 29th Mondial du Vent. The women’s parawing fleet was 9 riders against 30 men (SFT/Mondial du Vent), so a podium there means beating most of the women currently racing the discipline at world level. Ahead of her: Manon Dupé and Mae Haas, both French. Lippitsch is the highest-ranked non-French woman on the 2026 tour.

The pump-foil crossover

Parawing racing is judged on speed, efficiency, control and wing management, and the hybrid courses mix upwind, crosswind and downwind legs. So a lot of the race happens after you stash, on bare foil. Riders who pump and connect bumps efficiently keep the foil flying through the transitions where races are lost. Lippitsch sits in the SFT pump foil top 6 while podiuming in parawing, and she’s not the only one: women’s Leucate winner Manon Dupé is ranked 3rd in SFT pump foil. Pure foil-driving transfers.

The Leucate stage also proved the discipline “performs in lighter wind conditions” (SFT recap), another place where foil efficiency, not canopy power, decides results.

The gaps

Her age, home water, sponsors and full setup are not published in the sources we track, and we don’t guess. No direct interview with her had surfaced as of July 2026, so this profile stays on the verifiable record: results, ranking, and the pump-foil crossover that feeds them.

The Leucate event ran as a genuine experiment: race rules were adjusted live on rider feedback, including a beach-finish race where riders crossed the line at full speed on the sand. A podium scored while the rulebook was being written mid-event is worth more than the raw placing suggests.

Where her results land next

Her next verifiable data points are the stage results feeding the 2026 ranking. See our SFT Lake Garda 2026 results page, and the Leucate spot guide for the venue that hosted her first podium. For the wider field she races against, start at the riders hub.