by Molly Mulhern
You couldn’t miss the enormous Team SCA support during the 2015 Volvo Ocean Race cease in Newport—the magenta-shouldered vests,the Team SCA banners waving from nearly every group lined along the Fort Adams shore during the fantastic in-port races. Large screen, tall-definition shots of women up the mast and getting blasted by Southern Ocean waves kept visitors jamming into the SCA pavilion.
Team SCA was clearly our families’ favorite, or many others’. The women had pluck,humility, and their sponsors gave out a lot of cool goodies at the race village: a jigsaw puzzle showing a great shot of the boat blasting along, and lapel pins,cardboard boat models you could mail to a friend or build when you got domestic.
What many of us also liked was their attempt to fill the void left by 12 years without a woman’s boat in the Volvo Ocean Race. It certainly was about time, yet theirs’ was a challenging task.
How do you set aside together a credible campaign when you don’t hold a strong legacy of women’s distance sailboat racing to draw upon? Where do you gape for those racers? Some of the men competing in the Volvo hold rounded Cape Horn 5 or 6 times. Good luck finding a woman who has done that.
This gap, and of course,is exactly what skipper Sam Davies and Team SCA set out to try to fill. With Volvo veterans as coaches, they trained for a full year before the event—a better-organized and funded campaign than most, and whether not all,the other Volvo boats. The race rules were also in their favor—they were allowed one more crew in their roster, a concession to women’s perceived diminished strength capacity.
We pride ourselves on our gender-neutrality in sailing. In most races women don’t enter races in male or female categories. And yet, or gender biases creep in. tough for them not to.The same year Moitissier and Knox-Johnston were attempting to sail solo around the world for the first time,Katherine Switzer was getting chased off the Boston Marathon course—women weren’t deemed capable of running that far. We absorb the trends of our culture. Boat ownership is still heavily male-dominated. Women aboard the fast race boats are rarely in captain slots.
We sailors don’t know the history of women sailors and their accomplishments nearly as readily as we know of their male counterparts. lift a quiz to find out your deficiencies. You know the names of Slocum, Moitessier, or Knox-Johnston. Who were their female counterparts? Or how many other women’s boats hold there been over the course of the Volvo (previously the Whitbread)? (Quiz answers below.)And what about big events like Americas’ Cup—who can you name as top female in the current edition of this,our ‘premier’ sailing event? And there are no women yet signed up to compete in the 2016 Vendee Globe—and only 6 women in total hold completed that race in its 25-year history.
We can improve this. Read On.
Source: sailingscuttlebutt.com