role in the America’s Cup (23-year-old Dory Vogel had been Dennis Conner’s back-up navigator on Stars & Stripes in Fremantle in 1987). But shortly before the racing started Dawn was downgraded to the B-boat. ‘My competition lobbied successfully that if I was on the A-boat then Bill Koch was going to be relegated to second-tier publicity,’ she explains now. ‘I was the better sailor. And it was great
for the sponsors: Time Magazine, I was already on the cover. I was also in People Magazine and USA Today.’ But sure enough none of that featured the skipper, and ‘the guy who took my job knew which buttons to push’. A fellow team member later told me that Dawn hurled a dumbell across the weight room in frustration. ‘That’s the most difficult part for any-
body in an under-represented class,’ Dawn says now; at that point, her only option was to ‘keep my head up and do the best I can. Then, when you have the opportu- nity, you fight back hard, really hard’.
Women’s teams Even before America3
won the America’s
Cup Dawn was already writing a ‘mani- festo’ for an all-female AC team. But when that started to gain traction with her boss, Bill Koch, and his management team, she was told bluntly that she’d ‘never be in the back of the boat – and to get over myself’. ‘Problem was I was still considered a non-dinghy offshore sailor, so I must not know what I was doing. I’m like, OK, fine – I’ll go do the Whitbread instead.’ She flew to Uruguay and replaced the skipper on Heineken, the all-women’s team, for the rest of the 1993-94 round-the-world race. Meanwhile, plans for the America3 Women’s Team had moved ahead without her. Dawn was somewhere off Cape Horn for the much hyped press announcement (Bill Koch even trailered an ACC yacht into New York City) and, though she was invited to call in via SSB, she wasn’t able to get through. After the Whitbread she says she was ‘guaranteed’ an A-team position with the
56 SEAHORSE
New York Yacht Club for the next Cup – at double the salary Koch was offering. But she felt it was more important to be part of the women’s team. ‘I would have been a good pit person on
[the NYYC] team, but I wouldn’t have been part of management, part of decision- making. I’m not one of the “kumbaya” women – I just knew that I was going to have more influence.’ More than a quarter century later she says she would make the same decision again.
Lessons learnt Dawn was named skipper of Koch’s 1995 Cup defender, Mighty Mary, and they ulti- mately won several big races – but not the right to defend the Cup. She blames that in part on an all-male management team, not because men and women are so different but because ‘you can’t have good manage- ment if they don’t know what’s going on in the team, and you can’t be a good team member if you don’t know what’s going on in management. ‘It needs to be integrated, or you will
fail. Russell Coutts would never allow decisions to be made for him. And then have the management go, “Now just run along and go sailing, young man.” You cannot have a women’s team without women in the management; you will fail.’ It also taught her that the best team is
never built through artificial segmentation. That would help inspire her next project – which again she began to work on even before the 1995 racing concluded.
America True About six weeks before the A3
Women’s
Team finished a close second to Team Dennis Conner in the defence selections Dawn decided the way to win the next Cup was to create a mixed team. ‘I’d been on the men’s team. I’d been on the women’s team. We need to have one that’s open to everybody – and means something more than just America’s Cup stuff.’ They didn’t win the 2000 Cup, but the America True Foundation would go on to
help thousands of kids experience sailing. Just recently, however, it became a victim of its own success; ‘It’s not really needed any more, because there’s so much [com- munity sailing] around the country. So we’re taking the assets and incorporating it into an America True fund at Oakcliff, specifically to bring graduates of commu- nity programmes up to the next level.’ That’s a sign of progress, she reiterates.
‘Like my friend Billy Jean King says; she started the Women’s Sport Foundation… hoping that it would not be needed.’
WSF The Women’s Sports Foundation is a national organisation that promotes equity and inclusion, and Dawn says walking into her first fundraiser felt like home. ‘All of these women who had fought the same battle, in different sports…’ She served as president from 2001 to 2003. One key focus was to convince fathers of daughters to advocate for women’s scholas- tic sports. At that time many mothers might not have understood what their daughters were missing. ‘But when the dad was told, they knew. And they were waking up to the fact that it was unequal in a personal way.’
Plant a seed… By the late naughties Dawn had moved back to Michigan. She combined motiva- tional speaking, Maxi racing and writing a second book with a run for state legisla- ture – until Hunt and Betsy Lawrence asked for help writing a business plan for a sailing academy. Their original idea was to set up a local community sailing facility in Oyster Bay – an America True-style mission. ‘And then they said, “Well, we also have these other boats [a fleet of Match 40s]. What would you do with them?’’ Six months later the Lawrences chose the training academy model from a list of options Dawn presented and asked her, ‘OK, so when do you start?’ She laughs. ‘I accidentally designed the best job for myself, with no intention of working here.’ Eventually ‘they just wore me down:
PHIL UHL
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