Xavier Revil (born 28 May 1971) is a French sailor, who specialized in the multihull (Tornado) class.[1] Together with his partner Christophe Espagnon, he was named one of the country's top sailors in the mixed multihull catamaran for the 2008 Summer Olympics, finishing in a distant eleventh position.[2] Outside his Olympic career, he and Espagnon gave the home crowd a further reason to celebrate with a bronze-medal finish at the 2005 Tornado Worlds in La Rochelle.[3] A member of the local sailing regatta club in his current hometown Annecy (French: Société des Régates à Voile d'Annecy), Revil trained most of his competitive sporting career under the tutelage of his personal coach Philippe Neiras.[4]
Revil competed for the French sailing squad, as a 37-year-old skipper in the Tornado class, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Building up their Olympic selection, he and crew member Espagnon finished a credible sixth in the golden fleet phase to lock one of the eleven quota places offered at the 2007 ISAF Worlds in Cascais, Portugal.[5] The French duo started the series with a fantastic top-four mark on the second race; however, a broken halyard lock before race 4 and a wave of unimpressive tenths towards the final stretch bumped Revil and Espagnon out of the medal hunt to eleventh overall by a slight margin, amassing 69 net points.[2][6][7]