James Coxon has spent years setting world records on a bike in a shed. This week in Portugal, he's reminded himself why he fell in love with sailing in the first place.
The Welsh sailor is competing at the 2026 World Sailing Inclusion Championships in Portimão, and after three days of racing, he sits atop the Para Inclusive One Person Multihull standings. It's a long way from where his journey started, and further still from where it nearly ended.
Coxon raced Lasers as a younger sailor, good enough to earn a place on the British squad. University came, competitive sailing stopped, and life moved on to other things. Then came a diagnosis of a rare form of motor neuron disease, a condition that eventually robbed him of the use of his left arm.
He found para-cycling instead.
Coxon threw himself at it. After retiring from work, he trained 15 to 20 hours a week, often alone in a shed, mounted on a stationary trainer, chasing numbers nobody else was chasing. "I thought I'd devote myself to doing something special," he recalled. He ended up breaking four world records in recumbent cycling, the most recent a Masters 1-hour two-wheel recumbent record set just weeks before he arrived in Portugal.
But cycling, for all its rewards, never fully replaced what sailing gave him.
"I'm getting a bit old now, so I'm probably thinking about scaling down the cycling and going back to my roots in sailing," he said. Asked what pulled him back, his answer had nothing to do with watts or records. "You just can't beat the feel of sailing. You know, you just can't beat the feel of being on the water and feeling the wind in the sheets, the sail, looking at the wind shifts. There's just so much to it compared to cycling on a bike especially… it's just a lovely feeling."
There's a mental side to it too. Where daily exercise helped manage his wellbeing through the cycling years, sailing does something more. "Sailing takes you out of [everything]… You're just concentrating on the wind and the waves, and not ruminating in your head," he said. "It's absolutely fantastic for that."
For his comeback, Coxon chose a Challenger trimaran, drawn in by its affordability, its class association, and its speed. "The boat is fantastic fun, it really gets a shift on and it's really good fun in waves," he said.
That showed on day three. Racing in open ocean conditions outside the harbour, with deep swells and shifting gradient breeze, Coxon posted a second-place finish followed by back-to-back wins. "It was a good day, outside the harbour, some nice deep waves," he said. "I had a second in the first race followed by two first places, so yeah, very pleased. Can't complain!"
He's enjoying the event beyond his own results, too. "The Inclusion Championships is great," he said. "There's so many people with different needs doing fantastically well. Takes your breath away, it's just a lovely, lovely atmosphere."
The competitor in him hasn't gone anywhere, though. "Obviously if I didn't say I wanted to win, I'd be lying," he laughed. "I would like to win, but with sailing, you can never quite predict what's going to happen. Doing well, and I'd especially like to be on the podium."
From British squad dinghy sailor to world-record cyclist and back to the water again, Coxon's path has looped right round. In Portimão, he looks very much at home.
