Sailor Sebastian Kempe has qualified Bermuda for the 2027 Pan American Games in Peru.

Kempe finished fourteenth of the 63 competitors and the top Americas sailor in the ILCA 7 fleet at the LA Slam to guarantee the country a spot in Lima next year. While that does not guarantee Kempe will be the man to get to sail at that event, he is the clear favourite among Bermudians to get the nod.

The 21-year-old went into the event hoping to qualify at the first opportunity and was pleased to have achieved the objective.

The goal was to qualify the country, so we got that done,” Kempe said.

“Next up is the CAC Games and we’d already planned to do that in case I didn’t do well at this event as that is also a Pan Am qualifier.

“But I'm still going to go do that as I hear there is some wind in the Dominican Republic and it will still be Games experience.

“After that we have the World Championships in Ireland and then start training for Brazil in January, which is the first Olympic qualifier and my biggest goal is to qualify in Porto Alegre because if you do that it makes things a lot easier.

“You don’t have to worry about anything, last chance regattas and can just train for the Olympics and this event proves that we're on track.”

Kempe did not start the week in top but was consistently inside the top 20 sailors in the world as the regatta progressed.

“It was a slow start, for sure, and I wasn’t happy with my performance at the beginning of the week,” he said.

“There were too many mistakes and the mistakes kept adding up. But every day we knocked something else off and every day we got better at something else and by the end of the week we ended up in fourteenth, which is respectable in this fleet.

“There was really nobody in front of me that was not supposed to be or haven't been in front of me before. They’re all top-level sailors, so I was happy where I was, but you do sometimes think if you didn't have the mistakes at the beginning of the week, where would you have been?

“But I guess we'll just leave that out there for next time.”