Meet our Olympians: Sarah Douglas – Laser Radial
June 24, 2021
With but four weeks to go, Sarah is in Japan, staying safe while acclimatizing to the heat at Enoshima Yacht Harbour, the venue built for the 1964 Olympics, which will be back in action for the 2021 games.
This February, Sarah Douglas, Canadian Olympic Team member in the Laser Radial class, won the Laser East Midwinters in Key Biscayne Florida. In the fleet of 89 boats, Sarah scored four bullets and her drop was a 4. Sounds simple enough – she’s a pretty fine sailor and plans to do well at the Olympics. She is the reigning Pan Am gold medalist in her class.
This spring, Sarah is in Portugal competed against the tough Europeans, readying herself for the biggest stage of her competitive career.
Born in Burlington, ON, Sarah grew up in Barbados where she started sailing at 7. She flipped back to Canada for school with her brother Greg (Greg Douglas is a two-time Olympian in sailing who represented Barbados at Beijing 2008 and Canada at London 2012.) A young Sarah won the Canadian Optimist Championship in 2007 then moved up the ranks and continued to train. In 2010, an opportunity was presented to qualify Canada and represent the country at the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.
A volunteer in 2015, Sarah prepped the volleyball beach. By 2019 she is gold medalist.
For a few years Sarah lost her love of competing but got re-inspired in 2014. In 2015, she volunteered at the Toronto Pan Am games (raking the Beach volleyball court), which she feels contributed significantly to her understanding of top tier events. At the 2018 Sailing World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark where her sixth-place finish qualified an Olympic Laser Radial berth for Canada in the for Tokyo 2020. In the meantime she graduated from University of Guelph with a BComm in Marketing Management.
Then, leaping from volunteer to competitor, Sarah won a gold medal at the 2019 Panam Games in Lima, Peru despite a bacterial infection that kept her mostly in bed when she wasn’t racing. Shortly thereafter, he followed up with a seventh-place finish at the official Olympic test event for Tokyo 2020.
You can read more about Sarah in June’s Canadian Yachting.
