‘Completely incapacitated’ Olympian targets Worlds return

“I couldn’t see properly, couldn’t walk very far, it was like I was completely incapacitated,” recalls Sam Sills as he looks back on the freak injury that almost cost him his career.

The 32-year-old Team GB windsurfer had been out celebrating the gold medal won by team-mate Ellie Aldridge towards the end of the 2024 Olympic Games when his world turned upside down.

“Just at the end of night someone completely stupidly jumped off this wall into a crowd where I was and landed on my head, and then basically folded it backwards with their full body weight,” Sills explains to BBC Radio Cornwall.

“The rest was a horror story for the next year and a half, really.

“I knew something bad had happened, but it wasn’t super dramatic, and then it just got worse and worse and worse.”

Last January Sills, who finished fifth in the men’s iQFOiL event at Paris 2024, was struggling to walk and see as he went from the form of his life to wondering if he would ever take to the water again.

That freak accident had injured the key nerves running from his brain to the rest of his body, ruling him out of competition for more than a year.

“Everything that controls your whole body goes through that tiny little gap in your neck,” he explains.

“If that gets injured it affects everything basically.”

A lengthy period of rehabilitation ensued as Sills, from Launceston, balanced pain management with exercises to improve the neural pathways to his eyes and joints.

Having finished seventh at the 2023 World Championships Sills qualified himself for the 2024 Olympics in the iQFOiL – a windsurfing category in which boards use hydrofoils attached to the bottom to lift it out of the water, with speeds of up to 30 knots (about 35mph).

He returned to major action in November, coming 20th in the 2025 European Championships – the fourth best British sailor, having been the country’s top finisher in the 2023 event.

“For a long time I thought I wasn’t going to make it to be honest, I couldn’t walk so it was so hard and I couldn’t find a solution,” he says.

“So it was quite emotional to get back at the Europeans and get back to that world.

“It’s not just the competing, it was my life, job, friends, everything, so it was a real big goal to get back and it meant a lot to do it, and I can’t thank the people that have helped me enough really.”

Now approaching full fitness Sills is focusing on this summer’s World Championships on his home water in Weymouth in September – and the hope that it can propel him into the reckoning for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“It drives everything,” he says of his Olympic ambitions.

“You work backwards from that point and It’s where you sort of align all your four-year campaign to that point, really.

“It’s kind of mad when you think about it, but it’s good fun when you do it.”