Kiran Badloe became more famous for winning the TV show Expeditie Robinson than for his Olympic title, but the thirty-year-old windsurfer will remain a full-time top athlete in the coming years. On Sunday, he starts at the World Championships on his road to the 2028 Games.
Two months before the Paris Games, Badloe is in Malaysia for the first time in 35 days in a bathroom. The newly crowned winner of Expeditie Robinson, at that time still the reigning Olympic windsurfing champion, doesn’t know what he sees when he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
“My sunken face, my unkempt beard, my shoulders that had become much less broad… I was shocked,” Badloe says more than a year later in an interview with NU.nl. “Later that day, I stood on a scale and it turned out that I had lost more than 15 kilos.”
After a thick month of little food and drink on a desert island, Badloe had gone from 95 to 80 kilos. Anything but ideal for a top athlete with Olympic ambitions, but participating in Expeditie Robinson had been a dream since he was young.
Moreover, Badloe had unintentionally a large gap in his schedule. In February 2024, he lost the selection battle for the only Dutch windsurfing ticket for the Games from Luuc van Opzeeland, so he was not allowed to defend his title in Paris. And so Badloe could go to Malaysia. “This was the moment to do it.”
Badloe was often recognized after Expeditie Robinson
When Badloe said as a young boy that he wanted to participate in Expeditie Robinson one day, his parents had to laugh. The popular TV program was for famous Dutch people. And his windsurfing hobby would never make him famous enough.
That prediction did not come true. In 2021, Badloe became Olympic champion in the RS:X class in Tokyo, as the successor to his good friend Dorian van Rijsselberghe. It made him famous enough to be on the lists of TV producers.
As a result, last December almost 1.9 million viewers saw how Badloe in the final of Expeditie Robinson defeated dancer Timor Steffens and influencer Marijn Kuipers. Badloe immediately noticed that this victory unleashed a lot more in the Netherlands than his gold medal at the Games.
“Windsurfing is simply a small sport. After Tokyo, there was only a short period in which I was recognized,” he says. “Expeditie Robinson is much more mainstream. I have been approached on the street much more often by the program than by my Olympic title.”
Badloe can laugh about it. “Somewhere it’s hilarious. I have done everything for years to achieve a world-class performance in my sport. When that succeeded, I got a pat on the back and became known here and there. Then I’m not eating for a month on an island and suddenly everyone knows who I am.”
Badloe is facing another tough battle for an Olympic ticket
After his foray into the TV world, Badloe could have been at film premieres and talk shows every week. But the windsurfer decided soon after his failed mission to Paris that he wanted to go for a rematch at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
“I first took some distance from the sport last year,” says Badloe. “There was a chance that I would not miss sailing and would enter ‘normal life’. But fortunately that was not the case. It soon started to itch. I’m not done with windsurfing yet.”
The weight lost in Malaysia came back relatively quickly. Badloe is now at his ideal weight of 88 to 90 kilos. With that, he is trying to become world champion for the fourth time, after 2019, 2020 and 2021. The World Championships in the iQFoil class starts on Sunday in Aarhus, Denmark and lasts until next week Friday.
The 25-year-old Van Opzeeland, who won Olympic bronze in Paris last year, is still one of his biggest competitors. Moreover, two young windsurfers, Joost Vink (23) and Max Castelein (22), have announced themselves.
“The battle for the ticket for L.A. may be more exciting than ever,” says Badloe. “But one lesson from my participation in Expeditie Robinson is that I want to live more in the here and now. On that island you had nothing; no entertainment, no connection with the outside world. I found that a very nice feeling. Appreciate where you are. I hope to hold on to that for the rest of my sporting career.”