Walentyna Koziol was born with impaired vision. Fast-forward half a century and she is sailing a yacht through the mist on a lake in eastern Poland, without a care in the world.
“I can’t see the sails, but so what,” she says as she grips the rudder, occasionally joining in on the sea shanties being sung by fellow crew members.
“I feel the wind in my ears, on my forehead, on my face,” she says to explain how she gets her sense of direction. “If my right cheek is cold and the wind is blowing hard, I know that it’s coming from starboard.”
Koziol is gliding through a sailing course on Siemianowka Lake, near the Belarussian border, organized by the Polish foundation Imago Maris with the visually impaired in mind.
She and a dozen other students start with a course on the ins and outs of yachting — including how to tie essential sailing knots — and go over basic safety rules.
Then comes the fun part: time to leave dry land behind and put their newfound knowledge to work.
The yacht is specially kitted out with maps in braille, a GPS with speech software and a rudder that announces the vessel’s direction and speed.
To ensure full safety, blind crewmembers always sail alongside sighted companions.
“Experience shows that the right ratio of the sighted and the sightless is one-to-one,” Imago Maris president Ewa Skrzecz says.
“It’s my first time out on the water, on a sailboat,” says Piotr Sokolski, a young store clerk from the eastern city of Bialystok who is nearly blind.
“I had no idea sailboats tilt so much. At the first turn, I thought the boat was going to capsize, but then I found out that’s normal,” he said as he clutched the jib sheet. “I also didn’t realize that the water was so close when we were sitting on one side of the boat, and that we could touch it.”
Skrzecz believes sailing can greatly help the blind and visually impaired build self-confidence.
“Faced with the unknown, these people react no differently than anyone else: Some are anxious, others are open and up for something new,” Skrzecz says. “There are those who lost their sight and are now afraid to leave the house... We try to encourage them and tell them that life isn’t over, that it’s possible to keep doing interesting things.”
Blind sailing associations have sprung up around the globe in recent years, with a blind world championship involving 16 international teams staged earlier this month on Lake Michigan.
However, Poland considers itself a pioneer in the discipline, which has been practiced for years on the Baltic sea through a project called Zobaczyc morze (“See the Sea”).
Similar courses are run in the lake-rich Masuria region in northern Poland.
“We want to pass on that tradition and our know-how to other countries,” says Skrzecz, who is writing her doctoral thesis on sightless sailing.
Imago Maris will be running its first cross-cultural sailing trip on the Mediterranean next month.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier