“This is harder than the Olympics” Britain’s Hannah Mills on the Women’s America’s Cup

Ahead of today’s Puig Women’s America’s Cup, Helen Fretter went behind the scenes at the Athena Pathway to talk to Hannah Mills

The 37th America’s Cup is already rewriting the history books in many ways – today marks another major shift in the event’s evolution, with the beginning of the first ever Women’s America’s Cup.

Ahead of the AC40 competition, we visited the Athena Pathway base in Barcelona to chat to Hannah Mills, co-founder and Team Principal of the British entry into the Puig Women’s America’s Cup and Unicredit Youth America’s Cup.

Mills, like her male counterpart Ben Ainslie, wears many hats within the Athena Pathway – she co-founded the programme, which ranges from training programmes for youth foiling talent, right up to the four women who’ll be racing on the AC40 this week. And, like Ainslie, she is also helm and skipper.

And while Mills and Ainslie launched the programme together, Athena is its own beast with its own sponsors (Cobham Ultra is their main sponsor, together with Rolex, while supporting partners include Musto and yacht brokers Cecil Wright). To set up a wholly new campaign, in a near-unknown boat, creating two squads of sailors with zero experience in large foiling monohulls, has been a very very big job indeed.

“It’s very, very hard. But great.

“I think for us, with Athena Pathway, it’s the little sister to INEOS Britannia, but equally, we’re very much in many ways running our own campaign, which has been more challenging probably than I ever imagined,” Mills admits.

Harder than an Olympic campaign? Yes, she says, almost before I’d finished the question.

Did she know what she was getting into? “No, I definitely didn’t quite know. But in all of these things, you just learn so much along the way. For sure, as anything, if you did it again, you’d do some stuff very differently. But equally, we’ve got such an amazing team here that has just worked so, so hard to get us to where we are. I’m very proud of what we’ve done so far.”

Pooled AC40s for Women’s and Youth

The women’s and youth teams are all structured slightly differently. Each of the main AC37 teams (New Zealand, Britain, France, Italy, USA and Switzerland) entered both. These teams also purchased at least one AC40 (some purchased a second), which were pooled for use in the Women’s and Youth racing.

A further six entries, known as the Invited teams, were Sail Team BCN representing Spain, Jajo Team Dutchsail, Concord Pacific Racing representing Canada, the Artemis Technologies Swedish Challenge, and Andoo Team Australia. Budgets vary massively – some of the British team make wistful comments about the Swedish funding levels.

Some teams, particularly from the Invited group, had extremely limited time in the AC40 ahead of competition – something Mills says has been mission critical to Athena.

“I think ultimately for us, we always identified that time on the water was going to be the most important thing – but also the biggest challenge for these boats, because they are difficult to get hours and hours in.

“You have lots of breakdowns, lots of sensors and hydraulic challenges, but then also you’re limited by the batteries. Each battery set lasts an hour and 45-ish, 2 hours, depending on what you’re doing. We’ve had lots of battery breakdowns. You’re always conscious of battery fires. All of these new challenges, I guess, that as dinghy sailors, we’ve never thought about.

“Just the operation to get the boat on the water is an hour at the start of the day, an hour at the end of the day, a big wash down. It’s a whole team effort.”

The INEOS Britannia programme bought two AC40s, which were used for two-boat training ahead of the AC75 launch. One of which dramatically caught fire while training off Barcelona towards the end of the men’s AC40 training block. The boat – nicknamed ‘Crispy’ by the team – subsequently became the Athena squad’s practice boat.

“The rebuild of that AC40 has been hugely challenging and definitely cost us a good amount of time in the water – which we always knew was going to be the case. But we made the decision to get that boat back up and working so that when the other boat went into the pool for the racing, we still had a boat to sail. So hopefully, we’ll see that dividend pay off.”

Shared knowledge

There’s a stark contrast between the INEOS Britannia high-tech base and the shared boatshed the Athena Pathway squad works from just along the waterfront in Barcelona.

While the AC75 bases have segregated areas of top-secret technical zones and corporate hospitality bars, the women’s and youth teams set up is much more collaborative.

The British Athena squad shares a large hangar with American Magic and the Artemis-sponsored Swedish Challenge. Bench seats built out of pallets are dotted around, with team zones demarcated only by a few flags. While the jobs list in the INEOS base is a digitally generated maxi spreadsheet running continually on a large screen, there’s a whiteboard tacked to a pillar in the Athena base, with some cartoons doodled in green marker pen for extra motivation.

The atmosphere when we visit – admittedly before competition begins – is friendly, almost collegiate. The teams are all in this together and sharing knowledge only helps raise the level.

It’s not just knowledge they share – the AC40s are also pooled, so upskilling whoever is driving your rental for race day is in each team’s interests.

“That’s definitely been a consideration. We’ve tried to talk through the handling, because actually at slow speeds, it’s where stuff goes wrong because the boats are quite unstable just bobbing around – with the chase boat coming in alongside and the possible damage to the foil, if we get that wrong.”

Tricking the AC40 autopilot

The AC40s are semi-automated, which in many respects levels the playing field. Strength becomes suc a non-factor that when I ask trimmer Saskia Clark whether there’s any physical training element she just waggles her thumbs – they are the muscles that work hardest. The Athena squad had done some work on neck and core strength, F1-style, to counter the G-forces the sailors will be facing on the racetrack.

But semi-automated doesn’t mean simplified, as Mills explains: “You’re constantly trying to trick the autopilot to do what you wanted to do.

Understanding the limitations of the autopilot and how you can optimise it is just another big challenge.

“For the event, we will all get given the same targets in the boat. So on your data screen, you have targets for your cant number, which way you put the foil, the mainsheet tension, just everything is a target. That’s what’s imputed by Team New Zealand. It’s optimal in, say 10 knots, where you should set everything to make the boat go fast. So we’ll all have the exact same.

“This is just the boat saying, ‘if you set me up like this, this should be good.’ But you can put things wherever you want. And so you decide to go, ‘I want more Cunningham and a bit less mainsheet tension.’”

Things get trickier in conditions like Barcelona’s confused sea states where waves rebound from the port wall – factors the humans can see, but the machine can’t.

“And when you put the boat on a race course, suddenly you’ve got a lot of gas from the other boats. You’ve got boundaries coming up. So many things that mean putting something to a number just isn’t the right thing to do. It’s definitely nowhere near as simple as pulling things to a number.”

What next for women in the America’s Cup?

For Mills the team selections for the Athena Pathway squads have been a juggle between building a legacy, creating a team of women and youth who can carry this torch next time –  and also wanting to be competitive.

“That’s always been the balance for us. We’ve got so many amazing talented sailors in the UK that I would love to be a part of this. But ultimately, the time in the boat is so limited that at some point you have to put performance over opportunity. Because we want to win.

“Going forward, we’re hoping there’s quite quickly some continuity, particularly with the Women’s Cup and the Youth Cup. I think if we can get that continuity then it becomes much easier to broaden it out and to build more opportunities for more people to get experiences and learn.”

If Mills were writing a Protocol for the next Cup – would she like to see women on the senior America’s Cup boat, or another Women’s America’s Cup event?

“Oh that’s hard. I think definitely another Women’s Cup. I think there’s so much importance in a stand-alone event to give that opportunity to upskill and to get the experience, that’s what’s always been lacking.

“And whether you mandate [women on the boat] or whether you just do it on merit, I think, is an interesting discussion. I sit on the fence a lot of the time on that and swing one way or the other.

“But I think what the women’s event does is provide the opportunity for women to get there on merit regardless. And I think that’s exciting. This is just the start.”

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