🇮🇱 Refael Assaraf

The iQFOiL is the equipment the International Olympic Committee and World Sailing settled on for windsurfing, and the class runs its youth competition in three bands: under-15, under-17 and under-19. Under-15 is the bottom. The rigs are smaller, the courses are shorter, and every rider in the category will change equipment repeatedly before reaching senior competition. The title is a genuine world championship and a limited predictor, and both halves of that sentence are true at once.

Foiling has changed what the sport asks of a rider. Once the board lifts onto the hydrofoil, drag collapses and speed rises, but so does the consequence of any error: the rider is balancing on a wing a metre underwater, making continuous corrections in pitch and roll while the rig loads up with apparent wind. A touch-down at speed stops the board dead. Children learning this are learning a control problem, not a strength problem — which is one reason the youngest categories are competitive at all.

The 2026 championships ran for seven days at the north end of the Gulf of Roses, a venue the class uses because early-July conditions there are strong and repeatable. The four older categories were settled on the final afternoon by a knockout medal series of quarter-finals, semi-finals and Grand Finals, and the under-15 champions were honoured at the closing awards ceremony on 10 July alongside them.

Israel's week extended beyond Assaraf. In the under-17 girls' knockout, Noa Koren produced what the class described as an outstanding tack to win her semi-final and reach the Grand Final, where she took the lead from the overall leader before being caught in a sprint on the last downwind leg and finishing with bronze. Two riders in the closing races of two different age bands, from a squad the size of Israel's, is a coherent programme rather than a coincidence.

The pathway from here is well marked and steep. Israeli windsurfing has repeatedly converted junior results into senior international careers, but the conversion rate for any national programme is low, and the iQFOiL senior fleet is contested by adults for whom power is decisive in a way it is not at under-15. Nothing about a title in the youngest band settles what happens when the same rider is twenty and racing an Olympic trial.

What is settled is the result itself. At a world championship with nearly 400 entries from 36 nations, in the class that will select the windsurfers at the next Olympic Games, Refael Assaraf was the best under-15 boy present. The class recorded it, independent windsurfing media reported it, and it will sit in the results archive of the discipline for as long as the archive exists.