The The Telegraph Honours Maltese Shipping Pioneer John Ripard with an Obituary
John Ripard, who has died aged 97, was one of the commanding figures of Maltese yachting: an Olympic sailor, international judge, shipping entrepreneur, and one of the founders of the Middle Sea Race.
In 1960 he represented Malta at the Rome Olympic Games, competing in the Star class alongside his brother Paul. Then in the late 1960s he and Paul, after conversations with expatriate members of the Royal Malta Yacht Club, conceived the idea of the Middle Sea Race (RMYC), which would become the Mediterranean’s foremost offshore challenge.
It was intended to be a clockwise circumnavigation of Sicily including Lampedusa, Pantelleria and the Egadi and Aeolian islands, a 606-nautical-mile route starting and finishing in Malta, just a little longer than the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s own famous offshore event, the Fastnet Race.
Ripard won the inaugural race in 1968 in a Swan 36 Josian and triumphed again in 1970 in a Swan 43 Tikka II, ensuring that his name would be written into the event’s early history not only as an organiser but as a competitor of distinction.
In later years he served the sport beyond Malta as an international sailing official and judge, including at America’s Cup events and Olympic sailing competitions. These roles required the qualities for which he was well known; judgment, steadiness and a deep understanding of the water and those who raced upon it.
To generations of sailors at the Royal Malta Yacht Club, of which he became honorary president, Ripard was less an officeholder than an institution. He combined the instincts of a racer with the perseverance of an administrator. Announcing his death, the RMYC praised “a visionary sailor, an Olympian, and one of the founding figures of the Rolex Middle Sea Race”, whose passion for the sea and generous spirit had inspired younger sailors to take to the water.
John Charles Ripard was born in Sliema on March 7 1929 into a family already deeply connected with Malta’s maritime life. His grandfather, also John Ripard, had founded John Ripard & Son in Valletta in 1901 as a shipping agency, serving passenger and cargo routes through the Mediterranean. The firm would later become closely associated with the development of Malta’s shipping services.
John’s father held senior roles in the family shipping business, maintaining the connection between the Ripard name and Malta’s commercial seafaring life. The combination of merchant shipping, including containerised cargo operations, competitive sailing and club service made John Ripard an unusually complete maritime figure.
He was educated at St Edward’s College, overlooking the Grand Harbour, until the school was evacuated from the waterfront during the siege of Malta by the Italians and Germans during the Second World War.
One of his four sons, also called John, described his father as “a large character” who achieved much in his life as sportsman, businessman, traveller and an adventurer who continued to sail well into his eighties, and swam almost daily at Qalet Marku, on the north coast of the island, well into his nineties.
He had a mischievous and pioneering spirit and a zest for life, and with his family he would spend many months each summer sailing the Mediterranean, where, his son said, “he taught us how to live, laugh and love.”
In 1956 he married Rosette Camilleri, who predeceased him by two months, and is survived by four children.
John Ripard, born March 7 1929, died July 1 2026