Team Stena Bulk with Linda Rahm is one of the favourites to win gold in the Match Racing World Championship in Lysekil.

Lysekil Women’s Match will be inaugurated on Monday, 27 July, and on Tuesday, the Match Racing World Championship will begin with 12 top-ranked crews competing in Lysekil. Linda Rahm, who has won two years in a row, is the hot favourite. Stena Bulk has sponsored Linda Rahm with Team Stena Bulk for several years and is also one of the main sponsors of Lysekil Women’s Match 2009. Its sister company, Concordia Maritime, is one of the boat sponsors at this year’s races in Lysekil.

Last year, Linda Rahm won her second victory in Lysekil’s Women’s Match in an exciting final against Claire Leroy, France, and with both a bronze medal at the World Championship in 2006 and several other excellent results, Linda is now ranked no. 4 in the world. “For the fourth consecutive year, Stena Bulk is one of the main sponsors of Lysekil Women’s Match, an event that has attracted increasingly large numbers of spectators through the years. We are also sponsoring two-time defending champion Linda Rahm with Team Stena Bulk. This year, our objective is clear – we are going for gold”, says Ulf G. Ryder, President and CEO of Stena Bulk. Lysekil Women’s Match/ISAF Women's Match Racing World Championship 2009 The world’s largest match racing event for women has a EUR 50,000 prize, This year, the races in Lysekil have World Championship status for the first time and the competition will be held between 27 July and 1 August. Participants Twelve of the foremost female match racing skippers in the world will be participating and Sweden is well represented by Linda Rahm, Anna Kjellberg and Marie Björling. France, the United Kingdom, USA, Denmark, Germany and Australia are also represented. Lysekil In Lysekil, the sailing conditions for match racing are very good and because of the currents, the competitors have to risk sailing close to the rocks. As a result, match racing is very spectator friendly. The races take place in the middle of Lysekil, to be exact, in Kyrkeviksbukten close to the island of Släggö whose rocks form natural stands for the spectators. Lysekil Women’s Match will be held for the fifth time in Lysekil. The event has become a major attraction and the number of spectators has increased several times over. Match racing Match racing is a very crowd-pleasing form of sail racing. Only two boats at a time compete with each other and the first boat over the finishing line wins. Normally, the boats sail twice round a course that starts with a windward tack and finishes in a following wind. How fast the boats sail round the course is thus unimportant. Crossing the finishing line first is all that matters. Here, the teams’ tactical ability and skill are decisive.