Sailor Grant Janov and team are big winners at Melges 24 World Championship
World-class sailor Grant Janov of Malibu is celebrating a big win at the 2024 Melges 24 World Championship. Janov, part of a five-man crew, came in third overall in the regatta that featured teams from across the globe. The event held in San Francisco from Aug. 20-24, featured 30 teams for a series of 12 races over five days. Teams flew in from as far away as Croatia, Germany, and Italy to compete in the fast-boat regatta.
The Melges 24 is a 24-foot long, high-performance sport boat. According to Janov, “It’s got a lighter hull, bigger sail plan, and is a slightly faster boat than the average professional racing boat that we see in the U.S.” All the Melges boats must meet dimension and weight requirements. Sails and masts are measured, “so they know we’re all racing in one design sailing, so all the boats are the same.”
Each team has five crew members. Janov, at only 21, was the youngest on his boat, by at least 12 years. He served as one of two sail trimmers, working on the spinnaker, the biggest sail on the boat. “It’s the lightest material so it’s very baggy. That’s what we use to go down wind,” explained the recent UCLA graduate and former Malibu High School student. The crew also includes a driver, a tactician, and another person to organize and help with sails.
The Melges Worlds started at the San Francisco Yacht Club. Each of the 12 races takes about an hour in the rough waters of the San Francisco Bay.
“San Francisco is one of the harshest places to sail. It’s cold, it’s very windy,” Janov commented. “The equipment gets beat up very quickly. We tore a lot of sails. We broke a lot of wires. There’s a lot of work required to just get out on the water and to be able to finish races even if it’s for only a couple of hours a day.”
The sailors must make two laps around buoys before the finish.
“It’s like wheel-to-wheel racing,” Janov said. “We all race against each other. Sailing is a low-point score system so at the end of 12 races whoever has the lowest points wins the regatta.”
Janov’s boat actually started off the regatta with “quite a bit of bad luck.” In one race, their boat had to start three minutes behind the rest of the fleet due to a call back to the starting line.
“We were properly in last place but were able to pass 17 boats in that race to finish 13th,” he said. “That was definitelya highlight even though it was an unfortunate circumstance in starting. But climbing up a couple of spots every day was really cool, not something that’s common in a world championship. We only got third by the last race of the entire regatta. We were tied for third and we started the last two races sitting in fifth place, so, we were very happy to get that because the odds of winning were pretty low, all things considered.”
The young sailor and his two brothers, Ryan and Jordan, have been sailing competitively since they were very young boys. Jankov was asked onto this Melges crew by his coach William McBride, who served as tactician. It takes a confident sailor to crew with an older, more experienced team. “It was a great opportunity,” he said.
Janov’s latest sailing achievement is just part of his training in his campaign for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Grant and his 18-year-old brother Jordan are campaigning for the Olympics in the double-handed skiff, called the 49er. The brothers are currently in Santa Cruz “where it’s windy doing a training block. It’s a good place to get some foundations going.”
The sailing portion of the 2028 Olympics will happen in Long Beach, where the Janov brothers have “grown up sailing” both since the age of 12. Sailing on waters practically in their own backyard could come in handy for the pair as they set their sights on the 2028 Games.
