The case for the girls

Susie Westmacott, sister of crew woman Emma, responds to Peter Bentley's article about Amer Sports Too.

I feel compelled to write something after the scathing attack by Peter Bentley on Amer Sports Too, the all female campaign in the Volvo Ocean Race.

My instant reaction is - do men feel so threatened by an all-female team that they have to condemn them in this manner? These are top class female sailors wanting the opportunity to compete at this level in a round the world race. Is that so wrong? Let's face it, their only chance of achieving this in such a male dominated environment is to carry out their own campaign which Lisa has managed to achieve.

For anyone unaware of the circumstances, most of these Volvo campaigns are up and running years before the start. Even Amer Sports One was up and running a year before the start date, although the new boats were late being built. Lisa's crew were brought in at the last minute, in July of this year the core crew got together.

The remaining crew were brought on board right up to the start date on 23rd September. They were brought on board, partly to help Amer Sports One get to the start line but also to be the crew of the second Amer Sports boat.

So training as a team was limited to say the least. In fact, they probably sailed less than 24 hours together as a team before the start in Southampton. Once the boats were built the teams were split into half male and female and sail testing and set up of the boats was compared with the male crew testing against their fellow team mates and vice versa.

The result of this was the girls had the second choice boat, which was designed for a male crew rather than female crew. To anyone with any knowledge of sailing this sets them at a huge disadvantage before they even start racing. But all credit to Lisa for continuing and believing that any experience the girls' team could gain with all these disadvantages would be beneficial to the plight of female sailing in the future.

So we can now look at their performance.

The first leg: Lisa and her team on Amer Sports Too finishes just 6 hours 20 minutes behind the last boy's crew, Djuice who have had the full preparation time and their first choice boat. This is over a distance of 7,350 nm and 899 hours at sea. It would be hard to really criticise such a performance.

In addition, we should look at the lack of preparation some of the other crews had during that leg such as having to pick up supplies of food during the leg. Is this in line with race rules? Amer SportsToo on the other hand knew they were going to have to learn the boat and how it performed in different conditions and provisioned accordingly.

Surely boats that have to take on extra provisions and pick up spare parts should be penalised? Otherwise there must only be a severe weight advantage and no advantage in trying to keep the boat in one piece.

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