A New Tack : America’s Cup Entry to Use All-Female Crew

Merritt Carey, who has sailed the world, came running when she heard that the first-ever all-women’s team was being assembled for the America’s Cup.

“It doesn’t get any better than this if you’re looking for big boats and around-the-can (buoy) sailing,” said the 25-year-old Maine native.

Other world-class races--the Caribbean Gold Cup, the Transpacific, the Whitbread Round-the-World Race--are challenging and high profile, but in the world of big-time sailing, the America’s Cup is the Big Show.

And for 142 years, since hail-fellow yachtsmen from New York and London first decided to have a go at some ocean-going sport, the America’s Cup has been a male dominion, with only a sprinkling of women crew members.

Phyllis Brodie Gordon Sopwith, for example, raced with her husband, the British aircraft maker Thomas Octave Murdock Sopwith, aboard his Endeavour in 1934 and 1937. Gertie Vanderbilt, wife of tycoon and helmsman Harold S. Vanderbilt, was on the American entry Victorious during those same competitions.

But there has never been an all-female team.

Now, Bill Koch, the bold-talking, risk-taking multimillionaire who spent $68 million on the America 3 (pronounced “America cubed”) team to win the 1992 America’s Cup, wants to change that.

He’s back in San Diego with the sailing equivalent of sedition in his heart. Casting adrift his all-male winning team from 1992, it’s the women’s team or nothing.

“These women are going to make history,” Koch promised one overcast morning last week at the team’s Point Loma compound. “They are going to show that with a fast boat, a good attitude and teamwork, they can beat the men and the old tradition of sailing.”

Four hundred women applied after Koch sent out a casting call in March. Fifty--including engineers, world-class athletes in other sports and some Olympians--were selected to come to San Diego to compete for 22 spots.

“It’s not a sport you take up easily, like jogging,” said team hopeful Mary Brigden Snow, 34, a pilot in the Navy reserves in San Diego. “You have to be strong and you have to be smart. It draws on the complete person.”

If there was an unspoken criterion for volunteers, it was: no prima donnas need apply. Sailing, especially America’s Cup sailing, which throws a 16-person crew aboard a 75-foot-long boat, requires team players, not individual stars.

“You can’t really compete with the person next to you,” said Courtenay Becker, 29, a windsurfer and sailor from The Dalles, Ore. “You have to work with the person next to you.”

Some of the finalists arrived with little sailing experience, but with plenty of the requisite strength, athleticism and gung-ho attitude.

“The novices started by learning about tack, jib and port and starboard,” said Leslie Egnot, 31, from New Zealand, silver medalist in women’s sailing at the 1992 Olympics. “Now they’re out there doing tack-sets and Mexican drops like everyone else.”

Shelley Beattie, 27, from Malibu, is known to America as “Siren” on the weekly television show “American Gladiators.” She’s a bodybuilder, a kayaker and a power lifter.

“I think I’m built right to be a grinder,” said Beattie, cheerfully displaying cannonball-like biceps. The grinders work the wenches that help raise and trim the sails, an arduous assignment that tests speed, power and endurance.

Koch, 53, a Kansan who inherited hundreds of millions from his father’s oil refinery business, has picked an opportune time to inject something new into the cup competition. The 1995 competition had been shaping up as a pale version of 1992, with fewer entries, smaller team budgets, a less rigorous course.

The Japanese, the French and Dennis Conner, the moody prince of American sailing, will have entries in 1995, but New Zealand’s Michael Fay is staying home. The Italian team, which lost in the finals to America 3 in 1992, will also be absent, as will the Big Red team from Leningrad.

Naturally, the boathouses are full of skeptics about Koch’s current $25-million gambit. Sexism aside, the conventional wisdom is that any time you limit your talent pool to all-anything you’re taking chances. An all-Great Lakes team a few years ago flopped.

Yet no one is willing to dismiss the idea of Koch’s all-women’s team bringing home the trophy.

“If anybody can do it, Bill Koch can do it,” said Tom Ehman, a member of the San Diego Yacht Club and executive vice president of the 1992 America’s Cup Organizing Committee.

“This is typical of Bill Koch,” said Kansas Gov. Joan Finney, who serves on the America 3 advisory board along with Whoopi Goldberg, Betty Ford, Mariel Hemingway and cookie magnate Debbi Fields.

“He’s generous and he’s creative,” Finney said. “When the women come sailing into the harbor on Bill’s boat as winners after the last race, it’s going to be a boost for women around the world.”

To be sure, Koch’s venture carries nautical, physiological and sociological significance.

Dick Dent, former trainer of the San Diego Padres, will be building the women’s upper-body strength, the lack of which is usually cited as the reason women cannot compete with men.

Dent, who trained the America 3 crew in 1992, says that once he is finished, upper-body strength will no longer be an issue.

“The trunk has to be strong, the legs have to be strong, even the small rotator cuff has to be strong,” he said. Among other muscle-building exercises, Dent has the candidates doing one-arm pushups before breakfast.

The day begins at 6:30 pumping iron and running, before a carbohydrate-loading breakfast at a nearby Italian restaurant. By 9:30 the practice boat Kanza is being rigged for a full day of trial runs.

“To me, the idea of making history and competing against the men is great,” said Marci Porter, 26, from Virginia, a national rowing champion with firsts at the Pan American Games in 1991 and the Royal Canadian Henley in 1990.

“I’m sure the men are going to neg out on us,” said Beattie, which is sailing talk meaning to react adversely to a change in the competitive environment.

No one expects a team of men to take losing to women lightly.

“They’re not going to handle it well at all,” said America 3 Coach Kimo Worthington, a sly smile reaching his lips. “To lose is bad enough, but to lose to women, who most male sailors don’t think belong in the America’s Cup, that’s going to be great. Absolutely.”