🇹🇷 Parla Kabasakal

The iQFOiL is the Olympic windsurfing class, and its youth world championship is decided by a knockout medal series rather than by accumulated points. A week of Opening Series racing seeds the quarter-finals and hands match points to the leaders; the rest is quarter-final, semi-final, Grand Final. It is a format built to produce exactly the kind of finish Kabasakal survived — a single race in which a week's advantage can evaporate at one badly-judged mark and be won back on the next leg.

The 2026 championships ran from 3 to 10 July at Sant Pere Pescador on the Gulf of Roses, with nearly 400 athletes from 36 nations. The under-17 girls' knockout was the last of the four finals of the week. The Netherlands' Anna Jannieke Korevaar came through the quarter-final with what the class described as a flawless lay-line call, alongside Turkey's Ece Melis Baş. In the semi-final Israel's Noa Koren produced the tack of the day to win her race, and Turkey's Nisa Üstündağ came through with her.

The Grand Final itself started badly for the pre-race favourite. Poland's Michelle Urzykowski led off the line, then crashed after the first gybe and was out of contention. Kabasakal, holding the overall lead, looked to be in control until the last lay line, where a misjudgement let Koren through. A lay line is the line on which a board can reach the mark without another turn; overstanding it wastes distance, understanding it forces an extra manoeuvre. At foiling speeds the penalty for getting it wrong arrives immediately.

What followed is why the race is worth describing rather than summarising. On the final downwind leg Kabasakal closed the gap, drew level with Koren, and won the sprint to the line. Urzykowski took silver on the match points she had carried over from the Opening Series — a reminder that in this format the silver medallist can finish the deciding race behind the bronze medallist and still be second overall. Koren completed the podium.

Turkey's week was not a single result. Kabasakal's under-17 title was followed at the same awards ceremony by Zeynep Mavioglu's under-15 girls' title, and Turkey took the Nations Trophy for its performances across all youth categories, having also put Rüya Uğurlu on the under-19 women's podium in bronze and Ece Melis Baş and Nisa Üstündağ into the under-17 knockout rounds. A national programme that puts riders into the closing races of four different age groups is producing depth rather than one exceptional athlete.

The caveats are the ones that attach to every youth world title. The under-17 field is an age band roughly two years wide; the equipment is a youth rig; and the senior iQFOiL fleet, where the Olympic places are, is contested by adults for whom raw power is a large part of the equation. Kabasakal has a world championship, won in a knockout, in the class that selects Olympic windsurfers, decided by whether she could out-accelerate one rival over a few hundred metres of downwind. That is a specific and verifiable thing, and it is enough on its own.