kingston's teenage sail phenom will keilty eager to build on 7th-place world championship finish
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kingston's will keilty (left in can 2008 boat) battles high winds on the first day of the international optimist dinghy association's world championships on june 18, 2026 in tangier, morocco. keilty, 15, would finish seventh in a field of 284. (supplied photo courtesy of sail canada)
kingston’s sailing phenom came home from a successful performance in the international crucible inclined to rest on his laurels.
for a day, anyway.
you couldn’t pick up fatigue on will keilty’s face on thursday morning — he’s too preternaturally young-looking for a 15-year-old to visibly wear it. nonetheless it came across in his unbroken voice and his rhyming off his itinerary from the international optimist dinghy association (ioda) world championships in tangier.
flights from toronto to morocco, six days of training, then 12 individual races across six days with sandwich days of national-team competition—and he emphasized it was more draining than might be presumed.
“those race days, there were two races a day but spread out over the day, so that you’d head out at noon and be out of the water until 8:30,” he said.
and then the flights from morocco to toronto, and then back in his bed in kingston sunday night.
“he rested monday,” his mother alexandra keilty said. “then tuesday he was restless and told me he was bored, so he came to the club and did some volunteer coaching and then went golfing …”
and will interjected: “and then tuesday evening i raced john vines, a member here who’s 90.”
so much for rest and recovery.
master keilty finished seventh in a field of 284 sailors from 70 nations at the end of the tangier regatta, but that’s only the payoff to narrative — how he got there is the story.
keilty had high expectations going to the worlds after winning the ioda north american championship in halifax last month against a 172-boat international field, becoming the first-ever canadian to win the event.
yet in tangier he got off to a regrettable start, 38th in the opening race in his qualifying group on a day with 30-knot winds.
“with my size, high winds don’t suit me,” said keilty, who has outgrown the bantamweight class but not by much.
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in his estimation, it wasn’t physique or physics that undid him on day one’s high winds, though. it was a momentary lapse of confidence, and a talking-to from coach federico donzino provided the necessary corrective.
“i got i in my head that i’m not built for this,” he said. “my coach was telling me how far i had come, and how i need to be able to trust myself—this was my fourth time at the worlds, and i worked towards this.”
in the fifth race, the last of the qualifying rounds, keilty got off to his cleanest start to that point in the competition and led from start to finish. and when he qualified for the elite gold group of the top boats, he built on the momentum and confidence.
the step up in class could have amounted to a higher degree of difficulty and with it a fall-off in results, but the opposite was the case. “in the gold group everyone being high calibre and similar skill, it helped me, even though it’s more competitive” he said. “i recognized the people i’ve raced before.”
with second- and fourth-place finishes on the final day, keilty moved from 12th to seventh in the final standings.
the winner was manuel braganca of brazil, whose early excellence put him into a safe lead going into last pair of races—braganca’s 17th- and ninth-place finishes in keilty’s wake on the day 6 didn’t give the rest of the field any real shot of catching up. swiss and maltese sailors finished second and third respectively in the final standings.
“i still sailed well even though i’m not 100 per cent proud of where i finished,” keilty said. “but …”
the “but” was hanging in there until he could frame a perspective.
“… if i told myself four years ago that i was able to do this well in a world championship one day, i’d be very proud. the world championships is just a matter of who is having the best week of their life — the ones on the podium are great sailors but everyone knows that anyone who finished in the top 10 could be there — it could have easily been any one of us.”
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he could also take encouragement from canada’s fourth-place finish in a field of 32 nations in the team competition.
previous ioda world championships had taken keilty to spain, argentina and slovenia. the trip to morocco represented his last swing in the event — he will age out of this youth class. he was sheepish when asked about his long-run plans — he said he envisions sailing collegiately and hopefully studying law or business and mentioned competing in the olympics “someday,” in a class of boat to be determined.
“i’m more focused on what’s directly ahead of me and not what’s so far in the future,” he said. “the more i focus on what i have to do right now, the more chances i’ll give myself to be able to go where i eventually want to go.”
pressing directly in front of him, in part, is a bit of a grind—the north american and world events landed as the school year was winding down and by his estimate, he missed 70 days of classes at kingston secondary to practice and compete in national and international events. “the staff at the school was very supportive of will, but he still has some work [from the school year],” his mother alexandra said.
will is something more than a legacy member of kyc—he represents the fifth generation in his family to belong to the club. his two brothers and his sister all sail competitively.
will can’t remember not sailing or any details of starting out. “i just remember being four years old and going out with the [kyc] coach on lake ontario in the mornings—it was just me and him—and we’d be sailing circles on the water,” he said. “but a start? i just don’t know. it’s always been there.”
he admitted extended time to decompress was a notion that had been tabled, but suggested it was unlikely.
“at the start of the year i thought i maybe should take a break from sailing for the summer and stay home and do nothing,” he said. “but i’ve been back three days and i really want to get back to sailing.”
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