The class nobody can quit: Another Olympic medallist answers the ILCA's call
by Agustín Argüelles 19 Aug 18:02 BST
Ireland's Annalise Murphy — Olympic silver medallist © Sailing Energy / World Sailing
Some boats you sail. The ILCA, it seems, is one you keep coming back to.
That's the storyline running through the class this year, and it's about to get its biggest chapter yet: Ireland's Annalise Murphy — Olympic silver medallist and the most decorated sailor her country has produced — has applied to return to top-level ILCA 6 competition at this year's World Championship, staged on the very waters where she learned to sail.
A five-year gap, closed on home waters
Murphy stepped away from the Olympic single-handed dinghy after Tokyo 2020, closing out a three-Games career that included a fourth-place finish in London and that famous Rio silver. Now 36 and a mother to a daughter born last December, she has put her name forward for one of Ireland's four places at the ILCA 6 Women's Worlds, which this September will be co-hosted on Dublin Bay by two clubs with deep ties to her own sailing story.
She applied on July 16th and, for a while, sat first on the waiting list behind three already-confirmed Irish entries — Paris 2024 Olympian Eve McMahon among them. Any doubt about her intentions was answered on the water: racing an ILCA for the first time in five years, Murphy went on to win the Irish National Championship outright, opening a commanding lead that organisers and rivals alike read as a serious statement ahead of the Worlds. It marked a successful return to championship ILCA racing ahead of next month's ILCA 6 World Championship.
It's a comeback with symmetry built in: the Worlds will be raced from the clubhouses where Murphy first learned the boat, in front of the home crowd that watched her silver medal in Rio. The timing carries its own weight, too — her Nationals win came just weeks before the tenth anniversary of that Rio medal, ten years on from the afternoon that made her Ireland's biggest sailing name.
She's not the first legend the class has pulled back in
Murphy's return lands just months after another multiple Olympic medallist made the same call. In May, Croatia's Tonci Stipanovic — two-time Olympic silver medallist and five-time European champion — lined up at the ILCA 7 Senior Europeans in Kaštela after a year away from the class.
Stipanovic said it was the ideal moment to test his form ahead of a new Olympic cycle, adding that he remained highly motivated to return to the top. That comeback now brings him to Dublin Bay too — he's entered for next week's ILCA 7 Men's Worlds, racing the same waters Murphy will return to a fortnight later.
Go back further and the pattern gets even more pronounced. Brazil's Robert Scheidt — winner of the very first Olympic gold awarded in the class, at Atlanta 1996 — has left the Laser and come back twice. He first stepped away after Athens 2004 for a decorated run in the Star class, only to return and win the 2013 Laser World Championship anyway.
When his Olympic retirement announcement in 2019 lasted barely a year before he reversed course again, he was 48 by the time he lined up in Tokyo for what became a seventh Games appearance — the boat, he said, was where he could "really test the talent of each sailor" against equal equipment.
Three different sailors, three different decades of achievement, three different countries — and the same boat pulling each of them back for one more campaign. It's hard to look at that pattern and not conclude the class is simply irresistible to the sailors who've defined it.
What's next
Murphy's Worlds return is set against one of the biggest international showcases the class has staged in years: back-to-back ILCA 7 and ILCA 6 World Championships this August and September, drawing fleets from well over a hundred nations to compete for two of sailing's most fiercely contested world titles. For Murphy, McMahon and the rest of the Irish fleet, there's an added layer — a home crowd, a home club, and a chance to write another chapter in a rivalry-turned-friendship story between two of Ireland's leading ILCA sailors.
Whether Murphy's return marks the start of a fresh Olympic push or simply one more shot at a World Championship on her own doorstep isn't yet confirmed. But if the class's recent history is any guide, once it gets its hooks into a champion, it rarely lets go for good.
The Men's Worlds gets under way on Dublin Bay this week, with the Women's following in September:
Stay tuned!