USA 50 Racing

Sarah Newberry Moore — Skipper

Hoel Menard — Crew
USA 50 Racing is Sarah Newberry Moore and Hoel Menard’s Nacra 17 campaign for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. The current partnership combines Sarah’s Olympic experience with Hoel’s high-performance foiling background as they race and train on the international Nacra 17 circuit toward a home Olympic Games in Southern California.
Sarah represented the United States in the Nacra 17 at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with David Liebenberg and won silver at the 2023 Pan American Games. Sarah and David first teamed up in 2018 and built the USA 50 program through the Tokyo and Paris cycles, ultimately earning the U.S. Olympic berth for Paris. After the 2024 Games, Sarah committed to another Olympic campaign and spent 2025 identifying the right partner for the next cycle.
Hoel Menard is a San Francisco Bay Area sailor with roots at Richmond Yacht Club and St. Francis Yacht Club. His high-performance sailing background includes the WASZP and Nacra 15. He joined Sarah in the Nacra 17 while completing his studies at UCLA, and the pair became a full-time team in late June 2026 immediately after his graduation.
Their first World Championship together was the 2026 Nacra 17 World Championship in Quiberon, France, where USA 50 finished 25th. The team entered that championship with fewer than 30 days in the boat together and no formal training block as a team, using the event as an early international benchmark. They followed the Worlds with 13th at Kiel Week and 29th at the 2026 European Championship. In August 2026 they completed their first concentrated full-time training camp in San Pedro, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic sailing venue, shifting the focus from establishing basic crew work to improving speed and racing performance.
The USA 50 identity was created to represent the team rather than a single partnership. The name comes from the sail number USA 50 and was chosen to represent collaboration, patriotism and all 50 states. That structure allowed the program to carry its Olympic experience from the Sarah Newberry Moore–David Liebenberg campaign into the current Sarah Newberry Moore–Hoel Menard partnership. USA 50 combines world-class competition with sportsmanship, storytelling, coaching and a commitment to expanding access to high-performance sailing on the road to LA 2028.
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We Won the Olympic Trials!
From Sarah: “I’ve been off Instagram since our Olympic Trials started last month. Now I can say we’ve accomplished the goal so I’m back to deliver the good news! Future Olympians. We’ve been working a long time for this and it’s an unreal feeling. Thanks to our team on the ground: Tom Zajac, Angela Popiol, Tim Herzog. Thanks to our team at home (who logged so many hours abroad to make this happen) starting with Emmett Moore and Julia Paxton, our partners and sometimes coaches. Thank you to our parents, who helped...
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Sarah + David qualify the country for the 2024 Olympic Games!
2023 has been an epic year for our team. We have sailed in 6 major championships, and in 4 of them secured a top 10 finish. Whoa! Best year ever for USA 50. Four days ago, at the Pan American Games, we secured a berth for the USA in the Nacra 17 at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games!! This is a massive step for our team, and we are beyond excited. Huge goal achieved! We’ve slowly chipped away at our weakest points. Putting in the hours on the water has been our number one tool for improvement. Tom Zajac (bronze medal in...
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Wind + Waves in Lanzarote for USA 50 Racing!
Happy New Year! We are thrilled to start 2023 off with a bang: spending 6 weeks training hard with the international Nacra fleet in Lanzarote, Canary Islands (Spain) in big wind and waves! The training here has been incredible, and we are proud to say that we have made an immense amount of progress on downwind speed (as was our goal after 2022 Worlds) as well as lots of progress on upwind performance. Last year was a milestone year for our team. We brought Tom Zajac (2016 Bronze medalist) onboard our team as coach...
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