Pierre Schmitz, 20, Sets Double Wingfoil Speed World Record

On June 9 at the beach of Le Rouet in La Palme, France, 20-year-old Pierre Schmitz posted two of the fastest wingfoil runs ever recorded — a nautical-mile mark now pending ratification as an official world record, and a 500 m run that already stands as the best GPS performance ever logged over that distance.

The Numbers

• 33.00 knots average over the nautical mile (1,852 m) — 61.12 km/h, submitted to the WSSRC for world record ratification
• 35.65 knots average over 500 m — 66.02 km/h, already the fastest GPS mark ever posted at that distance

Both runs came during the Prince of Speed ISWC event, and Schmitz says the 500 m figure isn't a ceiling — he's waiting on the next strong-wind window to push it further.

Six Years in the Making

Schmitz, from Île de Ré, only picked up wingfoil in the summer of 2022 at 16, while training in IQFoil at the Pôle France Espoir in La Rochelle — right as the discipline itself was still taking shape. He won the first-ever French Espoirs Wingfoil championship in 2024 and the U19 category of the Défi Wing the same year, racking up several European podiums along the way.

He competes under the Zephir Project, a speed-record program co-founded by Antoine Albeau — 27-time windsurf world champion and speed-sailing record holder himself — and Marc Amerigo, backed by engineering and data-science teams and roughly seventy partner organizations.

Full report via Foil Magazine.