AAt the age of thirty she has already conquered the world. Petite, cheerful and outspoken, Cole Brauer recently sailed around the world non-stop in just 130 days, meticulously documenting her journey on social media. As the only woman to participate in the Global Solo Challenge and the youngest participant, she came second out of 16, behind Frenchman Philippe Delamare.
After much chasing, the Guardian caught up with her for an exclusive interview at the Annapolis Sailboat Show on the East Coast.
“Unfortunately, the form of a sailor is something that is so far-fetched […] most people never do sailing,” she says.
But Cole Brauer wanted to do something different. And she’s confident she won in more ways than one. The stereotype of the ‘white man, bigger, richer, you know. Breaking that mold into pieces was actually the goal,” she says with a grin.
If the half a million followers she has amassed on Instagram are anything to go by, she has certainly succeeded. And as Lydia Mullan, her media manager, suggests in an article of her own, Brauer’s biggest fans are women between the ages of 55 and 65 who undoubtedly admire her for seizing an opportunity that previous generations missed.
Cole Brauer, the girl who “didn’t grow up in a yacht club,” has been fortunate enough to receive financial support from a sponsor who is more of a philanthropist, supporting her all the way and demanding little in return. Not even publicity. But that hasn’t always been the case. Despite her athlete parents deliberately giving her a gender-neutral name at birth, Brauer was discriminated against because she was a woman and, at 6 feet tall and only 100 pounds, because of her height.
“You just can’t be afraid of rejection,” she says. “I was rejected thousands and thousands of times. I was told terrible things. And every time I would still be at the end of every tryout […] I smiled and said, “Thank you for your time,” and I walked away.
Fortunately, she finds resilience in her sense of humor: “And then I just talked about it, which I still do,” she adds with a laugh.
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But Brauer is more than a feminist. She is aware of the elite status of sailing and wants to take her mission one step further by making her beloved sport accessible to everyone. And in true millennial fashion, she accomplished this by posting videos to Instagram daily during her roughly four-month journey, whether she’s doing her laundry, dancing on the deck, showing up in pajamas on Christmas Day, or holding back tears after a twenty years. A foot wave in the Southern Ocean threw her over the boat and injured her ribs.
“I wanted to show that yes, if you’re a woman, yes, if you, even if you’re a man, if you’re young, if you’re small, if you’re part of these minority demographics, if you don’t have money , or if you have a lot of money but you don’t know what you’re doing with your life, everything was meant to be recognizable.
She achieves this on social media and in real life by not taking herself too seriously and even making us laugh. At an event hosted by Sail Magazine at the US Naval Academy the day before our interview, she seduced her audience of sailing enthusiasts with self-mockery and insight into her relationship with her family. Brauer talked about how access to the internet through Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite made her life on the boat a little more normal, as she could settle down to watch Netflix and have coffee with her mother every morning via FaceTime.
Standing on a large stage in her Uggs and leggings, the sailing champion describes how she called her mother at four in the morning at the start of her solo trip: “For the first two weeks I cried every day, hysterically, like a blubbering mess of a human. And finally, amazingly, my mother, who didn’t want me to do this at all […] my mom just says, “Well, you know, grow up. This is what you wanted to do. ”
All jokes aside, Brauer has strong opinions about corporate sponsors and the pressure they put on athletes. She wants sailing to become an inclusive sport where competitive sailors can win without compromising their mental and physical health.
With a degree in food science and human nutrition from the University of Hawaii, Brauer emphasizes the importance of eating right, staying hydrated and sleeping well throughout the race, something she thinks many of her male counterparts fail to do.
To rest, her 40-foot sailboat is on autopilot 100% of the time and she wears a remote control around her neck for when the boat needs to change direction. But the risks of sailing around the world are still extremely high and she warns that sailing alone means you can’t afford to make mistakes. “If something goes wrong, you hear a bang and or you hit something, or whatever it is, you have to have the energy to respond to it. […]That’s where being healthy and rested comes into play. In addition to good planning, she emphasizes.
But while she wants to make sailing more inclusive, she attributes much of her success to the unique support she received. “There was absolutely no pressure on me to compete. And with that little pressure, I did much better than my predecessors,” she says.
“My sponsors didn’t care what I did. All they cared about was that I was safe, that the boat was safe.”
From the moment Brauer stepped onto dry land in A Coruña, Spain, on March 7, she was greeted by 30 hours of back-to-back media interviews. Seven months after completing her 30,000 mile journey, it seems she still hasn’t had much time for friends and family.
Looking ahead, she, like athletes in other sports, is concerned about the toll competitive sports can have on mental health. “I don’t know if I want to do it the way many of these French sailors do it. Because they hate it. They just do it because the sponsors make them. Because they need the money. Because, you know, they’re professional athletes.
“And I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather just live in my van, away from everyone.”
Yet it is rumored that she sees a new solo race around the world as her next challenge: the Vendée Globe. But for now, she just wants to focus on being a “real person.”