British sailor Arthur Farley battles back from cancer to reclaim his Olympic dreams
Newly-crowned eSailing World Champion Arthur Farley finally won the big one after having to settle for silver in 2022 and 2023, but his win in Stockholm carries even greater significance than crossing the line first.
A talented sailor from the Brading Haven Yacht Club in the Isle of Wight and part of British Sailing’s Talent Pathway Program, Farley had just won gold at the Under–19 European Championships in 2022 when he was then diagnosed with a rare form of Leukaemia and forced to put his sailing career on hold to receive treatment.
Speaking to BBC South after his eSailing victory, Farley said, “It is a chronic cancer, so they don’t know the timeframe but in around 10 years it will return and will need treating again. Supposedly there is no-one under 40 years of age in the world with this type of cancer. I didn’t sail for nearly a year, and I am quite lucky in the sense that it wasn’t as aggressive as it could have been, but it is a lifelong condition.”
Farley, now 20, has completed the course of chemotherapy and immunotherapy and is now more determined than ever to achieve his ultimate goal: sailing at the Olympics.
He joined the British Sailing Squad in 2023 and returned to competition at the 2024 ILCA 7 Senior European Championships in Athens in February 2024, finishing 34th after very little preparation time. Farley says he was relying on his old skill and memory, but with no goal in mind – it was just good to be racing again.
Arthur followed this up with 8th in the ILCA 7 U21 European Championships in Mallorca in March and 10th at the 2024 ILCA 7 World Championships in Portugal in July.
“Getting top 10 in the Worlds and Europeans is good but I do think I can do a lot more. The goal is to go to the Games.
“When I couldn’t do my own sailing, I played the game a lot more. If you are a sailor, you do have an advantage. It teaches you a lot about managing a fleet and you can take that into your real sailing. It crosses over quite nicely,” he says.
“I think it [battling cancer] does mature you. It makes you realise there is more to life than Olympic sport. Potentially that is an advantage to have over your competitors in the long-run,” he adds.
The US$5000 eSailing World Championship grand prize from Virtual Regatta will go towards funding his 2025 sailing campaign which has already begun. From Sweden he flew straight to Portugal to begin training on the water with the goal of representing Great Britain in the single-handed Dinghy event at the LA2028 Olympic Games
