For Bermuda’s top athletes there is never truly an off-season.

While there may be a lack of competition at the highest level in some sports over the festive period, Sebastian Kempe will be working just as hard at a training camp he is hosting in Bermuda.

Kempe is on a path that he hopes will take him to the Olympic Games in 2028 but is still leaving no stone unturned nearly two and a half years before the biggest sporting event in the world reaches Los Angeles.

“I’m home in Bermuda and I'll be training with a British sailor and a Guatemalan sailor for about two weeks before Christmas,” he said.

“The first qualifying event for the Olympic Games is the World Championships in 2027, but that’s in January 2027, so it’s quite early. But all the time I can get right now in the boat the better. We’re always looking for more time and some of these guys in the ILCA fleet have been sailing this boat longer than I’ve been alive, so the more time that I can get the better.”

Kempe has described 2025 as a “turning point”, making changes to his coach and training regime in a year in which he won a silver medal at the Junior Pan American Games in Paraguay and also picked up his first race victory among the elite fleet during the French Olympic Week Regatta in April.

“There have been ups and there have been downs for sure this year,” Kempe said.

“But I would say generally it's been a turning point this year. It's taught me a lot of lessons and if I could go back and do it all again, there were lessons that needed to be learnt. Those lessons were dealt with and I'm moving on now.

“I’ve started working with a new coach who I’m getting on really well with. We’ve been tackling the problems that I go through with honesty, maturity and full-on tenacity.”

Kempe’s relatively new training regime appears to have started well after he finished as the top under-21 sailor at the Vilamoura Grand Prix last month. As well as claiming that honour, Kempe finished thirteenth overall in a stacked fleet.

At the start of the event he cut a frustrated figure with light winds resulting in Kempe not seen at his best on the opening day of the regatta.

“That’s the classic in Vilamoura,” he said. “You just sit there and wait and wait and wait. The first few days of the event there was no wind, so I wasn't upset with those results as I didn’t really believe that those races really should have been raced.

“But inside those races I showed some good things and some bad things, but a lot that happened just wasn’t in my control, so I was pretty even keel going into the last two days.

“On the penultimate day I put on a performance worthy of some smiles and I followed it up again on the final day, which was tough and windy with 20-25 knots and with 30-degree shifts.

“But in the last six months every time that we've spoken I’ve been saying how I've come out on the wrong side of these types of days, but I was on it.

“It just goes to show that the changes in the programme that I’ve been making in the recent months are paying off. So overall I'm pretty happy with how things went with the process and otherwise, but of course I always want to be pushing forward more.

“We’ve improved in our data and taking a look at things such as downwind performance and then keeping track of the analytics.

“Looking at the data over the span of the eight races that we had, I overtook 31 boats on the downwinds, so big improvements. I’m just grinding into things like that and tackling those problems to turn them into higher and higher scores.”