It would be hard to imagine the Premier League featuring mixed male and female teams, but at the top level in professional ocean racing this has been a successful option for sailors going back decades.
In the 5,800-nautical mile Transat Jacques Vabre double-handed transatlantic race, which starts on Sunday from Le Havre bound for Martinique in the Caribbean, the IMOCA class features five mixed crews out of a fleet of 23 boats.
Among them is the 43-year-old British skipper Simon Fisher who is sailing on board 11th Hour Racing Alaka’i with the 35-year-old Swiss yachtswoman Justine Mettraux.
No one is saying they are any weaker than the all-male crews in this highly competitive fleet — quite the opposite. The Fisher-Mettraux racing partnership has been one of the most successful this season with podium finishes in the Rolex Fastnet Race and the Défi Azimut 48-Hours.
“One of the unique things about our sport is that it doesn’t necessarily separate genders or even age – everyone can get involved, male or female, young or old – it’s a sport that rewards experience and talent,” Fisher told The Times from the cockpit of his foiling machine on the dockside in Le Havre. Less a conventional sailing boat, it feels more like the command module of a spacecraft, an essay in black carbon fibre, bristling with ropes and digital navigation equipment.
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The amiable Briton, who made his name as a navigator in the fully crewed Volvo Ocean Race, says there has never been a point when gender has come into decisions he and Mettraux make on board. “No, no, not at all,” he said when it was put to him that some jobs may suit a man more than a woman, for example heavy lifting of sails on the foredeck.
“Justine is a really good sailor and also a really good athlete, so it’s just like there is never a moment on the boat when we make a decision based on our gender, it’s just like we are both sailors and that’s it.”
With Fisher’s long experience at the nav table behind him, he tends to leave Mettraux, who learnt to sail on Lake Geneva and possesses a highly competitive and disciplined mind, to do a lot of the deck work, especially on the bow, the most dangerous part of a foiling IMOCA yacht.
A veteran of two Ocean Race campaigns herself and one of the most highly rated female prospects in short-handed sailing, Mettraux says the fact that she is a woman and Fisher is a man is an irrelevance on their boat. “It is not whether you are male or female that matters, but whether you’re a good sailor or not,” she said. “And you need the same skills to make the boat go fast and in the right direction. It’s nice to see that a mixed team can perform well and that that could happen in other sports as well — there could be more incentives to mix genders in different teams, in different sports.”
Another podium is well within this duo’s grasp even though their boat — the former Hugo Boss raced by Britain’s Alex Thomson to second place in the 2016-17 Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race — has been superseded by newer designs such as the race favourite Apivia, sailed by France’s Charlie Dalin and Paul Meilhat.
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Fisher says the key for them is to sail their own race, do everything to a high standard and not worry too much about the opposition as they chart a course across the vast expanse of the Atlantic, down to their turning mark at the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. “If our performance is good enough, which I hope it will be, it’s just about trying to be smart and managing the risk in all the situations we face,” he said.
“You don’t always have to be looking for the move to win the race, but you don’t want to fall off the back of the leading pack either. I think we’ve got a shot at having a good result but there will be times when other boats will be quicker and equally times when this boat will be quite quick too.”
Invariably the TJV starts in horrible, late-autumn weather as the crews smash their way out of the English Channel and across the Bay of Biscay in heavy seas, but this time the meteo picture is looking relatively benign. There should be a nice northwesterly breeze for the start and then light airs on Monday that will give the sailors a chance to settle into what could be an 18-day passage.
Fisher knows, however, that making the right calls on tactics and navigation in light winds in the early stages, with coastal features and commercial shipping and fishing boats to take into account, will be critical to staying at the front of the fleet. “The weather’s not looking too extreme at the moment but it could be complicated for other reasons,” he said with a knowing smile.
