He Leaves the Wheelchair on the Pontoon. The Free Lesson Is the Expensive Part.

A yacht club in Galicia has taught adapted sailing free of charge since 2012, at about €150,000 a year. The hardware problem was solved long ago; the sport has still been refused the Paralympics three times.

César Maquieira is fifty-one and lives on the Galician coast in northwest Spain, where the Atlantic pushes far inland up drowned valleys called rías. He fished and sailed for most of his life. Then a degenerative muscle disease took the strength out of his legs, and for a while it took more than that — by his own telling he was depressed before he was adapted.

In 2016 he heard about a regional accessibility scheme and turned up at the Monte Real Club de Yates in Baiona for a first lesson. The weather that day was rough. He went out anyway, and he has been going twice a week since.

Told that quickly it sounds like a story about a boat. It is mostly a story about a budget.

What a free lesson costs

The club's Escuela de Vela Adaptada opened in 2012 under a motto that translates as sailing for everyone. It runs daily from September to June. Instructors have to complete training specific to adapted sailing before they teach it, and the boats are built for the job: GOS16 two-seaters with ergonomic seating and a weighted keel, so that a dinghy sailed by someone who cannot throw their weight against a heel will not go over. There are hoists on the dock and a classroom ashore for the theory.

Dozens come through in a year — people with physical, sensory, intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, and lately also older people, children in care, and women who have survived domestic violence. Nobody is charged.

The programme costs roughly €150,000 a year, paid out of regional government grants, business sponsorship and the club's own pocket. Olaia Cabo Martinez, who runs the school, describes what that money buys: "The sense of freedom in the boat, when they leave the wheelchair, is incredible. You can see that they have more confidence in themselves."

The sport that keeps being told it is too small

Sailing used to be a Paralympic sport. In January 2015 the International Paralympic Committee dropped it from the Tokyo 2020 programme. Sailors had not lost interest — the sport failed the IPC handbook's minimum criteria for worldwide reach. It was not restored for Paris 2024 either. On 30 January 2023 the IPC named the twenty-two sports for Los Angeles 2028, chosen from thirty-three applications, and sailing was again left out.

World Sailing had spent the intervening years doing what the criteria asked for. By the time of the LA verdict the federation counted forty-one active nations across five continents, more than 630 registered para sailors, and 210 sailors and coaches from thirty-nine countries put through its Para Sailing Development Programme since 2017. None of it changed the answer. "No sport has successfully been reinstated and we knew this was going to be a difficult task," the federation's chief executive David Graham said afterwards.

Ramps were never the problem

Peter Jacops runs Sailability South Africa out of Cape Town, building SV14 dinghies drawn by the Dutch design firm Simonis-Voogd; before that he built accessible boats in Thailand. The Tokyo decision is why he started, and Brisbane 2032 is what he is aiming at. Jacops puts it plainly: "The problem is that sailing is now physically accessible but not financially accessible."

In Britain the Disabled Sailors Association has been saying a version of the same thing since 1993, when Mike Wood — paralysed from the chest down in a road accident, and once turned away from a sailing club for using a wheelchair — put the £20,000 of his compensation into founding it. "Wheelchair users are often not catered for," is how he describes what he was trying to fix. The association now runs two yachts with accessible berths and heads, lends forty adapted dinghies out to clubs, and reckons more than 25,000 disabled people have got onto the water through it. It is currently crowdfunding £2.5 million for a boat capable of going round the world.

What the research actually supports

The strongest evidence here is not about sailing at all. Jaarsma and colleagues reviewed fifty-two studies of sports participation among people with physical disabilities — twenty-seven of them on spinal cord injury — for the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports in 2014. The personal barriers were health and the disability itself; the environmental ones, facilities, transport and getting in the door. What kept people coming back was simpler: enjoyment, health and other people.

Nearly every barrier on that list is something that happens before the sport starts. A club that removes the fee, owns the hoist and trains its own instructors is working on that half of the problem.

Weak evidence, soft money

Sailing-specific research is thin to the point of embarrassment. Catherine Lamont-Robinson, Val Williams and Trevor Thompson followed eight disabled sailors through tall-ship voyages for a 2018 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, working from audio diaries kept at sea, artwork made on board and interviews afterwards. Last year Boarini and colleagues published a five-day sailing rehabilitation study in Scientific Reports: eight Italian adolescents with rare skeletal disorders, wearable sensors, validated questionnaires, and an explicit statement from the authors that this was a feasibility and safety pilot rather than proof of benefit. Two studies, sixteen people between them.

The money is no sturdier. Some €150,000 a year for dozens of participants is a high cost per head, and much of it is regional grant money, which lives one budget cycle at a time. Whether the model survives a poor year in Galicia's sport budget is not something the club controls.

Martinez remembers a student who cried at the sight of a starfish and another who jokingly proposed marriage after a fast reach across the bay. Maquieira puts his own case differently: "To navigate on the sea, it's like a leap, to arrive at something new."

Neither of them is describing therapy. They are describing an ordinary afternoon that most people can buy and some people cannot.

Sources

• Peter Yeung, "With Adapted Sailing, the Sea Is for Everyone", Reasons to be Cheerful, 14 September 2026 — https://reasonstobecheerful.world/adapted-sailing-school/
• Escuela de Vela Adaptada, Monte Real Club de Yates Baiona — https://www.mrcyb.es/escuela-de-vela-adaptada-3/
• "No Sailing at 2028 Paralympic Games", Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 30 January 2023 — https://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2023/01/30/no-sailing-at-2028-paralympic-games/
• "US Sailing Statement On Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Sailing IPC Decision", US Sailing, 2015 — https://www.ussailing.org/news/us-sailing-statement-on-tokyo-2020-paralympic-sailing-ipc-decision/
• Jaarsma, E. A. et al., "Barriers to and facilitators of sports participation for people with physical disabilities: a systematic review", Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 24(6): 871–881, 2014 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24730752/
• Lamont-Robinson, C., Williams, V., Thompson, T., "Pitching Perspectives on Disability: Voyage Experiences of Disabled Sailors on Tall Ships", Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 20(1), 2018 — https://sjdr.se/articles/10.16993/sjdr.23
• Boarini, M., Banchelli, F., Fittipaldi, S. et al., "Feasibility and safety of sailing based rehabilitation for rare skeletal disorders using wearable sensors and patient reported outcomes", Scientific Reports, 2025 — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-22231-8