GENOA, Italy — A tactical error at the start of the Giraglia Rolex Cup 2000 was not enough to prevent the Open 60 Riviera di Rimini from winning line honors in Genoa, Italy, by a massive margin.

Skipper Stephano Raspadoni made up for the error, which many boats made in forgetting there was a first mark to round off the town of Saint-Tropez, with some intelligent navigation later on in the race. After biding her time in the early upwind stages of the race, she made her move after the Isle of Levant when the fleet turned downwind with spinnakers.

She overhauled the early race leaders, the Maxis Rrose Selavy and Tiketitan, and by the Giraglia Rock, which Riviera reached at 5:16 a.m., she was approximately two miles ahead. She stretched her lead on the long downwind leg to the finish just outside the port of Genoa, finishing at 2:03 p.m. This means she covered the 243-mile course in 26 hours and 3 minutes, which, close to the course record of 24 hours 7 minutes that she set two years ago.

The navigator on the Wally 80 Tiketitan, Andrea Merani, admitted they might have won the race had they not sailed so close to the coast of Corsica. Hesaid: "Riviera stayed away from the coast and I think they benefited from more wind than us. I think they were sailing around 3 knots faster than usfor about 3 hours during the night." Although rated as the fastest boat in the fleet of 78, Luca Bassani's Tiketitan came in at 3:26 p.m., over an hour after the winner.

At 4:07 p.m. the early race leader Rrose Selavy rolled into Genoa. America'sCup veteran Mauro Pelaschier was delighted with the performance of the Frers 73, and was hoping to win the race on corrected time. He said: "The trouble is the wind is improving so that may be good for the slower boats still finishing."

Pelaschier won the start and led the fleet round the first mark at Saint-Tropez, and held the lead for about five hours. He made light of the fact that the clew of the mainsail broke early on in the race: "We had taken the clew to be fixed at a sailmaker in Nice, but they did not do avery good job. When it broke, we went to the first reef, and one of our crew was on the boom for four hours while he repaired the clew."

The Open 60 Shining concluded its race at 4:42 p.m. After an excellent start where it rounded the first mark third, its best gennaker ripped badly and the crew had to replace it with a smaller one. Helmsman Roberto Ferrareza also had a fight with a fish. "Ten minutes after the start, a large tuna fish got stuck in our rudder and was slowing us down.It took me about 15 minutes to remove it."

The Wally 77 Magic Carpet, finished just two minutes behind Shining, after a close tussle in the last few miles of the race. Chief executive of L'Oreal and owner Lindsay Owen Jones, enjoyed the race but was disappointed with their tactical decisions: "We weren't very clever about what the wind was going to do."

The rest of the fleet is expected to come in during the next day, so the final outcome of the race over corrected time will not be known for sometime. It remains to be seen whether the small boats, Clin d'Oeil and Wind Marrakech — who performed so well in the inshore races of the Giraglia Rolex Cup in Saint-Tropez — can reproduce that form for the Giraglia race itself.