Polish sailors make strides at Para World Sailing Championships

"The wheelchair is part of her body,” said Prokopowicz. "She is in a wheelchair and cannot walk but every day Piotr and Monika work really hard on their boat."

Poland's Monika Gibes and Piotr Cichocki are bidding to qualify their country for the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games. The 2015 Para World Sailing Championships is the final opportunity for them to do so, and the Polish duo have made great strides toward that goal.

"I'm here to qualify for Rio 2016 and to make the Polish national sailing team,” Gibes said. “That's the first goal and we need to achieve it.”

They are one of seven teams aiming to qualify in the SKUD18. Just five more places are available, meaning two teams will leave Williamstown, Melbourne, Australia, disappointed.

Compared to the sailors around them in Williamstown, Gibes and Cichocki lack experience in the pressure of a World Championship. They have only sailed at one event together in the build up to the 2015 Worlds, finishing 11th at the Delta Lloyd Regatta in May in the Netherlands.

But their drive was evident on the first day of competition in Melbourne. They laid down a marker by taking the first race win. After 10 races, they are clinging onto the fifth overall standing with the finals to take place on Thursday (3 December).

"Monika has actually only been sailing for one year so she's very much a beginner in some aspects but she has spent about 100 days on the water this year,” their coach Grzegorz Prokopowicz said.

"In Poland we have meetings and a sports congress for people who are disabled,” continued Prokopowicz. "Peter, her crew, went to a meeting and asked, 'who wants to go for a sail with me?' And Monika said, 'I would like to try sailing.’ It was about a year and a half ago and then she came to us this year and told us she was ready to go.”

Gibes was born with meningomyelocele, a type of spina bifida, and uses a wheelchair; the SKUD18 is a boat that can be adapted to suit the needs and requirements of sailors with severe impairments.

"The wheelchair is part of her body,” said Prokopowicz. "She is in a wheelchair and cannot walk but every day Piotr and Monika work really hard on their boat. We are a young crew and we only have one year of SKUD18 experience so we watch everyone, every day and we do a lot of things from what we see and what we learn.

Whilst Gibes only has one year of sailing experience, the same cannot be said of Cichocki who clocks up 30 years of sailing know-how that includes windsurfing, multihulls and offshore racing.

A former able-bodied athlete, Cichocki is relatively new to Paralympic sailing with two Para World Sailing regattas under his belt but he has a firm understanding of the sport.

"Peter is a really experienced sailor,” Prokopowicz said.

"Monika gets better and better each and every day.”

Together, the two have shown a strong team chemistry on the water.

Gibes and Cichocki will have to fend off Canadians John McRoberts and Jackie Gay, who are three points behind the Polish crew entering the final day of racing in the World Championships.

More information on the 2015 Para Sailing World Championships can be found on the event website.