The Bermuda Gold Cup has become the latest casualty of Covid-19.

Organiser the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club has been forced to postpone the World Match Racing Tour-sanctioned regatta this year because of difficulties it has had in securing title sponsorship.

“Planning and hosting an international event with competitors from many countries is a challenge in any given year, and even more so this year,” Leatrice Oatley, the Gold Cup chairwoman and past RBYC commodore, said.

“Although we had many sponsors committed, we have been unable to secure a title sponsor. Rather than consider putting on a sub-par event, we will refocus our efforts for 2022 and beyond.”

The regatta had been planned for the end of September, but will be rescheduled to next year at a date to be announced.

Taylor Canfield and his Stars+Stripes USA team-mates won a third Gold Cup after defeating defending champion Ian Williams and GAC Pindar in the 2020 final of the match-racing spectacle in Hamilton Harbour.

The US Virgin Islands skipper’s second triumph in the regatta in two years bumped him farther up the pecking order to within four wins of equalling Sir Russell Coutts’s record of seven wins, achieved between 1990 and 2004.

It also completed an impressive double as the previous Gold Cup served jointly as the 2020 Open Match Racing World Championships, which reverted to a one-off event as a result of the postponement or cancellation of many regattas owing to the pandemic.

Canfield, 32, has now won the World Match Racing Tour’s holy grail twice, having clinched a maiden title in 2013.

The King Edward VII Trophy, awarded to the winner of the Bermuda Gold Cup, is the oldest trophy in the world for competition involving one-design yachts.

First presented in 1907 by King Edward VII at the Tri-Centenary Regatta at Jamestown, Virginia, honouring the 300th anniversary of the first permanent colony in America, the trophy is the only King’s Cup ever to be offered for competition in the United States that could be won outright.