The fastest woman in the Vendée Globe round-the-world yacht race on solitude, strength and the gender pay gap: part five of the interview series on role models that promote equality.
Even if I can’t see land, I know it’s there. It gets extremely tough mentally when things don’t work. We focus beforehand on practising how to stay calm and positive.
I didn’t have Starlink, and I only had data packages sometimes. It’s good not being constantly connected to the outside world.
Absolutely! On the boat, you have time to think about life. That’s a privilege.
It’s a balancing act. You want to push the boat, but it has to hold out. And so do you. Everything has to keep working for weeks.
Sometimes. Especially at difficult moments: “Come on, hang in there.” It’s like a friend.
We lose a lot of girls when they hit adolescence. In many cases, there’s a lack of role models, infrastructure and support. Sometimes it’s little things like a lack of changing rooms. One major step against discrimination in elite sport was making mixed teams mandatory – for example, at the Olympic Games.
Yes, but that depends on sponsors and teams. I negotiate my own contracts and discuss things with other sailors.
The only difference between the sexes is physical strength, but technology, strategy, and self-management are just as important. Perhaps women can learn to use these skills in a particularly precise way. And that isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.
In some sailing regattas, teams with a higher proportion of women are allowed to bring more crew members on board in order to balance out physical strength and overall weight within the team. Boats could also be designed to cope better with such differences... But this is only happening slowly.
(Laughs) We could try that. But I like the rules the way they are.
Images: Julia Ishac; texts: Annabelle