The case for the girls

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

Taking this next leg: One of the teams Tyco with several years of preparation and many years of experience has retired. What is all that about? Are they pushing the boat too far? Should they not have been made to restart (after all it would only have been a week late) and been made to sail one of the toughest legs and push their boats, potentially arriving a week behind the front runners?
Tyco would still have had two weeks of the stopover to prepare for the next much shorter leg, a more luxurious situation to the later comers into Cape Town who had just 10 days to turn the boats around like djuice, SEB and Amer Sports Too? Or should they be allowed to transport the boat to Sydney, protected from the Southern Ocean with a fully rested team? Is this racing or cruising?

There is no doubt that experience in these races has a lot to answer for. Women have just not been ocean racing or accepted in sailing as long as the guys. The guys have a much larger pool of experience to draw from but that has not stopped the women competing and building up their experience. Take the least experienced of the guys on the other boats, given them less than two months to put a boat together, 24 hours to sail as a team, it would be interesting to see how they do. Only then you can compare directly the success of Lisa's team.

Looking through the photos of the other crews we can all dream up our story of the picnics and tea parties on board. Are these crews racing or taking this too easy? If the girls are really on a tea party then why are they so close to the highly experienced and well-prepared teams? The first leg, if the guy's performance was marked at 100%, the girls performed at 99.3 %. This leg they are performing at 99.6% of the guys performance.

Is it not about time the criticism was stemmed and their performance was given the credit it deserved.

I think it is wrong to say that Lisa and her crew are not doing anything for female sailing. They are in fact showing that women can be competitive in such tough environments. Ellen MacArthur, Shirley Robertson etc., have all had the luxury of fully funded and prepared campaigns. Ellen has shown that under these circumstances women can be competitive.

I would like to see an all female team, of 12 rather than just one, perform on a level playing field with the support and preparation time that the other teams were given and once they build up their experience in ocean racing and navigating in these conditions, who knows how they will compete. Or is that what the guys are afraid of?

I would hope that sponsors will continue to fund female campaigns for this exact reason - it is an exciting time in female ocean racing. Each time they compete, they come that much closer to their male counterparts.