Hannah Mills has said she “absolutely” believes she can win the first women’s America’s Cup this year as she set out her plans to inspire a new generation of female sailors to take to the water.
The most successful female Olympic sailor of all time will be reunited with Saskia Clark, eight years after winning gold together for Great Britain in Rio, to form the core of a new team that will compete in the Puig Women’s America’s Cup in Barcelona, but has ambitions beyond success on the water.
Under the Athena Pathway banner, an organisation Mills set up with Sir Ben Ainslie to help create greater equity in sailing, the team will take to the water this September having recruited not only a strong team on the boat but “shore side” too, with a shortage of female engineers and data analysts in the sport also something Mills hopes to change in the medium term.
“There’s nothing like competing for your country on a global stage and we’re 100% in it to win it,” Mills said. “I believe we can win, absolutely, and it would be mega. It’s the first ever one, so it’s history making, it’s huge. But genuinely I’m at a stage in my career where I’m so passionate about the next generation and seeing what’s possible. That extends beyond sailing, but sailing and sport is a vehicle to showcase that.”
Mills was approached by Ainslie to join the British Sail GP team while she was competing for Team GB at the most recent Olympic Games in Tokyo. “I ignored his call, I made him wait,” Mills said of their first conversation. But she seized the opportunity to become strategist for the team racing an F50 catamaran. “For a female in the sport of sailing there’s not many opportunities to carry on professionally,” she said. But there’s so much excitement around foil sailing, we started Athena Pathway with that in mind.”
The Women’s America’s Cup will be contested using the AC40, a foiling monohull, which can reach speeds of up to 100km/h. Mills acknowledged that even she “had to have a word with myself” when first taking charge of the boat, but hopes the excitement and the challenge of racing at such speeds will help to inspire curiosity among aspiring female sailors.
“It’s a huge step forward,” she said of the new competition. “Many people have asked me whether the solution should be for women to be mandated to take part in the men’s race, but for me having a standalone event for females to push each other and show what they can do is very important. The AC40s came out 13 or 14 years ago, they’ve all been sailed by guys, and we have this huge experience gap.
“These boats are machines, they’re very difficult to sail. I had to have a word with myself, front up and take it on. I just had to get stuck in, so I think it is a good example and symbol. The more we can speak about it the more we can show that it takes grit and determination to do this, and that’s good. That’s the role we can play in this.”
In a sport dominated by men, and supported by technologies which are also largely maintained and developed by men, Mills has long been an exception. As a student of mechanical engineering, she recalls being one of just four women in a cohort of 100. That is, in part, why the Athena Pathway team recently announced a partnership with the group Cobham International to help steer girls and children from disadvantaged groups towards studying Stem subjects.
“I look at what sailing has given me,” she said, “and the Athena Pathway is about introducing the new generation and giving them more opportunities. From my experience girls will automatically count themselves out [from taking new opportunities] because they haven’t got the experience, when a guy maybe wouldn’t. When things like that creep in, slowly but surely you lose females from sport because they just discount themselves. What we need to do is recognise that and catch it, not just in sailing but across the board.”
