Dropped by India in 2022. Back to conquer in Asian Games 2026, all on a board she taught herself to fly!
Goa’s original water baby, India’s windsurfing poster girl, Katya Coelho, 26 just done what no Indian has ever done before: qualified for the Asian Games in windsurfing for a second time.
Katya was all set for Hangzhou 2022, topped every trial, packed her bags... and then got dropped at the last minute because she missed the Sports Ministry’s top-8-in-Asia cut-off. But, that she turned it into fuel! Four years later, she smashed the Sail India 2026 trials, broke her mast mid-race and still finished first and then flew 40 hours through war-disrupted routes to Spain and France to finish top-5 in Asia and punch her ticket to Aichi-Nagoya 2026. And she’s been breaking barriers since she was a kid.
Started at 11 watching her dad Donald, a former national champion in same sport and brother Dayne race, she was India’s first and only lady windsurfer in Nanjing by 14. By 19, the first Indian woman ever at the Asian Games in 2018. With no other girls to race in India, she literally had to compete against the men and beat them to stack up more than 10 national golds.
Then came iQFOiL, the futuristic Olympic class that costs Rs 8-10 lakh a set, has zero coaches in India and she had to learn from YouTube. In 2022, she became the first Indian ever to win an international iQFOiL medal, taking silver in Pattaya also.
Today she’s so iconic, she’s only the second Goan sportsperson after Brahmanand Shankhwalkar to get her own chapter in the Class VIII Konkani textbook also. No sponsors queueing up. No media spotlight. Just a girl from Dona Paula who says she’s spent more time on water than on land and now she’s flying back to the Asian Games to finish what she started.
Beating soldiers
“With my brother it’s never been anything weird (she laughs). He’s never had that ego. With other men, it was different. In a sport where I often had no female fleet to race, I had to line up against men and beat them! They’re always in awe of me. They’d always be intrigued to know how I’ve gotten into sailing. And definitely the army guys never liked me beating them, because it definitely hurt their ego a bit.”
Learned it on Youtube, Medalled for India
“We don’t have a big fleet to train with and it definitely does get lonely because I’m only training with my brother. Every other country, especially China, they are training with a minimum of four to five athletes at one time. In sailing, your speed, your angle, it only gets better when you’re sailing with somebody else. That is one of the reasons why we always want to travel and train in Europe. In fact, during the monsoons we’re not even allowed to sail if it’s Goa! Europe also showed me just how harsh it can get. There was this time when I was sailing in The Hague. It got really brutal. During the World Championship, the waves were even bigger than my sail. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me. That was a time when I was actually scared of getting into the water. I fell, my foot got stuck in some kind of rope.”
But scariest battles aren’t always visible
“No one asks women windsurfers this: How do you handle periods during a championship when you’re in saltwater for six hours straight with no restroom? This is one of the most difficult things about being a woman athlete, which is really not spoken about.
Even during the Asian Games I had my periods. For me the pain is really, really strong. And we wear a harness right above our stomachs and it kind of snatches it. We don’t really complain.”
Resource gap is just as painful
“The most embarrassing thing I saw at the Games Village was that everybody else had something as basic as a coach. I didn’t have a coach with me on water. I didn’t have access to drinking water during the races, too! I had to ask coaches from other countries if I could keep a bottle of water in their boat. After every race, each country would be discussing which side of the course would be better, tidelines, everything a coach would tell you on the spot. I didn’t have access to that. If you see the Chinese, they had a spare board. For me, if something broke on water that would just be the end of it. I would not be able to race. Windsurfing has no IPL, no massive prize money in India. Ours is completely at the back of the list. But sailing is now being more accessible. We are having live streams, which can be really fun to watch. In 2026, that change still hadn’t reached the sailing team. Stuck in Gamagori, far from the main Games Village, we didn’t even get tickets for the opening ceremony. I was very upset. These are moments an athlete lives for.”
Fishermen knew first, OG mentors
“I’ve learned a lot about the tide from the fishermen. No one knows it better than them. We can have all the best apps, but they spend their entire lives on the beach. That’s why I love when Nationals are in Goa, I know the beach like no other. It’s also why I bristle at the tourist version of my home! What tourists completely get wrong about Goa is that everybody thinks it’s just a party destination. But there is so much more. We have one of the biggest coastlines, we are home to so many species of fish, we even sell seaweed.”
But Katya Coelho is still here. Still training with her brother. Still reading the tide from fishermen. Still flying over waves bigger than her sail. Because as she puts it: “I would do this every day of my life.”
Highlight: Started at 11 watching her dad Donald, a former national champion in same sport and brother Dayne race, she was India's first and only lady windsurfer in Nanjing by 14. By 19, the first Indian woman ever at the Asian Games in 2018.
