Clifford Day Mallory Cup


The Clifford Day Mallory Cup, or Mallory Cup for short, is the competition for the United States Adult Sailing Championship.
In a sport with hundreds of different classes of boats and a national champion for each, the point of the Mallory Cup is to determine an overall champion for the sport of sailing in the United States. Run by US Sailing, eliminations are held throughout the country, and the finals are raced in a different type of boat each year to eliminate any advantage a sailor from any particular class might otherwise have. Competitors sail boats that are provided by the host club, and teams are required to race each boat at the event once so that nobody will have an advantage in terms of equipment.
As with national championships in other sports, the top three finishers receive gold, silver and bronze medals, respectively. The winner likewise holds the Clifford Day Mallory Cup itself until the following year's champion is crowned. A piece of history in and of itself, the Mallory Cup was originally gifted by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to the family of Lord Nelson in appreciation of his command over the English fleet that defeated Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile.

History

While Women's Sailing Championship and youth had a national, ladder-system championships for a quarter century, a similar championship for men eighteen years and older was not established until 1952, when twenty of the twenty-three district associations, now called Regional Sailing Associations, competed in the inaugural match won by Cornelius Shields of the Larchmont Yacht Club. The next year, the regulations were relaxed to permit female members in the crew but not at the helm, and in 2013 the regulations were changed again to allow women to helm as well and the championship was renamed the U.S. Adult Sailing Championship.