Annie Balasubramanian records best-ever Canadian women's performance at ILCA U21 World Championships

Annie Balasubramanian records best-ever Canadian women's performance at ILCA U21 World Championships © Sail Canada

Annie Balasubramanian from Toronto took the 15th spot overall in ILCA 6 at the 2024 ILCA U21 World Championships, which ended today in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. She therefore registered the best-ever Canadian performance in the history of that competition in this class.

Through the 12 races held during the week, Annie Balasubramanian finished three times in the top 10 to end the event in 15th place.

Since the class was first included at the ILCA U21 World Championships in 2013, the top Canadian performance in ILCA 6 had been the 20th -place result by Clara Gravely, which she achieved twice, in 2018 in Poland and in 2019 in Croatia.

"It feels pretty good to get the best-ever Canadian performance in ILCA 6 in the history of the competition," said Annie Balasubramanian. "It was totally unexpected. I had no idea what any of the past results or standards were, so I'm really happy to set this benchmark. And I'm sure it'll be passed by so many girls coming up behind me. I'm pretty excited and hopefully, next year, I can do even better."

"I have never sailed in swell or wind like this before, so having the opportunity to practice some more in the breeze and the swell in the days before, and really trying to figure out how to sail in these conditions was huge," she added.

"The biggest challenge was the first race of the second day, where it was super windy. I went for a tack and dislocated my shoulder completely at a mark rounding. So having to put that back in on the water without losing more than two boats was the biggest challenge, and then it was a matter of just recovering from that and pushing through with the injury until the last day, but it went well," she added with a smile.

Following are the Canadian results at the 2024 ILCA U21 World Championships:

ILCA 6 (/80)

15. Annie Balasubramanian
39. Lilly Rainham
46. Anna Parolin
51. Elspeth Simms
61. Loa Dinel

ILCA 7 (/155)

79. Jacob Townsend
102. Kyber Lovshin
113. Noah Adler
125. Mats Braaten
126. Finn O'sullivan
154. Alex Zaputil