Cole, first of all: DA first name is more likely to be given to boys in America. Why did your parents call you that?
(laughs) Well, yes. My parents had a rather strange sense of humour. In the 90s, they decided to give both my sister and I male names because they thought it would make it easier for us to get jobs in any field we wanted. That actually helped me get a job on paper once. But then I showed up at work and got fired because they thought they were hiring a man with the same experience, not a woman.
Really? What kind of jobs were those?
I started out as a female skipper on boats, and yes, there were definitely quite a few who weren't afraid to tell me that they didn't want to employ a woman. I respect that, at least they were honest with me.
Does it help to have more masculine first names? You're obviously a woman. I have three daughters myself, but it would never have occurred to me to call them Peter, Paul or Max.
I've definitely thought about it. If I had children, I would probably give them male names. I think that helps. You can do it either way, but to me Cole Brauer sounds pretty strong. The name couldn't be any stronger. For a woman, it's great. When I was growing up, I didn't mind my name. Sometimes a few people would have liked a softer name for me. But I was quite a tomboy. So it actually suited me quite well. My sister is called Dalton, which is also a strong male name. So I didn't have the feeling that I was an outsider. If she'd been called Sarah or Jennifer, for example, and I'd been called Cole, it wouldn't have fitted, would it?
You were the first American woman to sail solo around the world as part of the Global Solo Challenge. You were also the youngest participant and came second. That's impressive, but apparently many people didn't believe you could do it.
Definitely! I had planned that a while ago. I think it was around 2019 or so. It was pre-Covid and I started promoting the idea. Then, in 2022, the Class 40 I was sailing on lost its mast and it was all over. I put everything on hold and didn't think about it much until 2023. But from then on, it just kept going.
There are always these classic heroine stories between men and women. "Despite all the adversity, she persevered." - "She proved that small women can achieve great things." - "She made history - and she looks so good doing it." And so on. You can think these narratives are good or bad, but either way they oversimplify things. How do you deal with it?
I think it's really interesting because when we had the initial conversations in my team about the campaign, we were trying to figure out what we really wanted to say. We had some general ideas of what we wanted to say to the public. We wanted to emphasise that this is the first American woman to sail solo. We want to encourage people who don't come from a sailing background to do things like this as well. We wanted to encourage people to fight for what they believe in. If you believe you can do it, then you should do it. That was sort of our campaign. Then we just let all the media tell their own story about it. We thought that was a better approach than completely controlling the message. We wanted to see where the journey would go. We wanted to see how people would interpret it. And people liked the idea of, "Oh, wow, she's really small". Personally, I don't think I'm small.
You are 1.55 metres tall.
The "small factor" was actually quite interesting for me because I didn't expect people to be so keen on it. But I thought it was just because I was a woman. It would resonate with half the population in the world. In any case, it's probably the case that my height appeals to a lot of people. I think people look at me and would never think that I could achieve anything. But I look at myself and think I can achieve anything. I've never seen myself as tiny or small. I see myself as normal. I know how to do everything: I know how to go to the supermarket, I know how to walk down the street, I went to college. I've done everything that everyone else does. I've never felt restricted in any way. But other people look at me like I can do less.
I think a lot of people think of women as being less capable than men. It sounds like it was often quite difficult for you to get ahead.
It's really difficult because when you grow up, you don't really believe that you are different from your male counterparts. My parents raised me to be myself and to be strong. We had friends, men and women, and I didn't see them as different. But as we got older and started venturing out into the world, everything started to change. I began to wonder why that was. At school, I was still stronger than most of the boys. So it didn't really impress me that I was different because it was something I couldn't change. Because I'm a woman or because I'm small.
The commander of the sail training ship "Gorch Fock" told me that he has noticed that it is mostly women who climb onto the top yards. For one thing, it's easier if you're a bit shorter. But these women are simply tough. That's not because they have to be tough. They just are, compared to the male sailors.
I can say with certainty that women have a higher pain tolerance than most men. There is this idea that men are very strong, and physically they are, but women are strong in a different way. We have to learn to build on the things we are good at and work with them. This includes our mental abilities, our memory and our ability to do things that we enjoy. One thing I talk to people about is object permanence. In psychology, this refers to the ability to recognise that an object is still there, even if it has been hidden or moved. Many men forget that an object was there. Women will say: "What are you talking about? It's right there! You have to lift your jacket to see it!"' Women never lose the constancy of the presence of objects, whereas men seem to. So I think women have a lot of strengths, especially when it comes to sailing. I think we have an incredible amount of strengths. The hardest part was when I entered the professional world and people wanted to give me less money just because I'm a woman. All these excuses, like, "Oh, you eat less. " "You don't have a family." "You're smaller, so we should pay you less." I heard every excuse imaginable as to why they wanted to pay me less. But throughout my upbringing, I had always been treated exactly the same. So it was quite strange starting out in the professional world and having to fight for it.
You are now part of Team Malizia. You'll be working with Boris Herrmann, Francesca Clapcich, Justine Mettraux, Will Harris and Holly Cova and many others to form a diverse team. So far you have been travelling alone and have become quite famous, you have half a million followers on Instagram. But being in a team is something else. It's like joining a family. Are you the lone cowgirl on board?
Maybe a vagabond. It was actually really nice to join the team because I didn't know them that well. I'm not someone who just jumps off cliffs. I like to observe and learn before I do anything crazy. I think a lot of people saw me doing the circumnavigation and didn't realise how much I had trained for it. Everyone thought I was the crazy girl who came out of nowhere. They didn't realise that I had been preparing for it for quite a long time. I'm doing something similar with Malizia. I feel like I'm building up little by little and I'm in a learning process with training wheels right now. The team has helped me a lot to learn and develop my skills. It's a super complicated boat and I've never sailed on a boat like this before. They did a wonderful job of guiding me through the steps and letting me play. Most teams would never let someone like me just come on the boat and push buttons and play with things. So it's an incredible honour to be part of this team. I wish other people could have an experience like this. You can read all the textbooks in the world and take as many notes as you can, but you don't realise how powerful these boats are until you hold the ropes in your hands and push the button that swings the keel. When Boris and Will gave me the opportunity to play with the flight control buttons and feel the boat lift, I realised just how powerful it all is.
Wasn't Boris Herrmann a mentor as part of "Project Magenta"?
This happened in parallel: Boris and Holly got in touch with me in March 2024. They told me that they would like me to join the team wherever I would fit in best. At the same time, I had the connections to Project Magenta, which was developing a mentoring programme at the time. That's how the connection came about. They brought me on board, and then we brought Magenta in to encourage other women as well.
The boat is sailed by a team. Can the Malizia 'Seaexplorer' be adapted to the different body types of the team members?
We made the base of the Coffee Grinder smaller because I was working on the sail trim. The boat is still a bit tricky for me because I can't see out of the cockpit at all.
You can't see out?
I often sail blind! It really is like that. When we were travelling recently, I was working in the cockpit on the last day. Will [Harris] looked over at me and said, "You can't see out, can you?" I said, "No ..." We'd been doing this hardcore race for six days. And Francesca [Clapcich] said, "Of course she can't, she's much smaller than all of us, she can't see anything." The whole time I was walking around during the manoeuvres, throwing the headsets at everyone, and everyone was like, "Why do we have to use these stupid headsets?" And I tried to explain that I can't see you if you go to the bow without a headset. I'm the one controlling the sail, so it's probably appropriate to wear a headset. Now we wear the headsets for every manoeuvre because otherwise I really can't see anything.
And when you reached the finish line, you were the only one who said: "Oh, are we there yet? I didn't even notice. I can't see anything."
It was at Fastnet Rock. We sailed round it at dawn and Will asked: "Well, what do you think?" And I was like, "Thinking about what? What do you think?" I crawled outside and looked up at the lighthouse, it was right there - wow, I'd never seen it before! But at that point I hadn't said that I couldn't see anything from the cockpit.
"Hey Cole, come out of the cellar, you have to see this...!"
(laughs) The boat is great because it offers so much space for manoeuvres. However, I'm very short and can't reach the ceiling in the cockpit.
Team Biotherm arrived in Kiel on Saturday evening and I was there the next morning to say hello. The team invited me to come on board and I said, "Okay, really? Great!" The ceiling was very low and the bunk area was super cramped. The team said that was typical of Paul [Meilhat, skipper]: "It's not comfortable, but that's the way it is and you have to deal with it."
I definitely like the smaller boats. But we are lucky that we have so much space. When you're doing manoeuvres with lots of people in the cockpit who can't stand upright, it's very uncomfortable. If I was alone on a boat, I would still construct it around me. It changes the way you sail, and as a smaller person you can sail it much more comfortably. Still, I like sailing Herrmann's boat. It's really well built for sailing with a team. I look a bit like a child in it, and it doesn't look like I'm a professional sailor because the whole cockpit is so big. But the cockpit is really well designed.
There are twelve nations represented in Team Malizia, there are a lot of women on board, it's a really strong team. How important do you think diverse teams are?
It's great to have such a diverse and international team, because the French have dominated the world for so long. The advantage of having a mixed team is that we get so many different ideas from so many different people. I've never understood why you only want to have the perspective of 50 per cent of the population. For example, if the team on land is only made up of men, you only get 50 per cent of one perspective, whereas if you also have women from different countries on board, you get 100 per cent. This is exactly what Boris and the entire Malizia team are aiming for with the Ocean Race Europe: We are very conscious of who is on board because we want to be flexible. We want many different cultures, ideas and ways of sailing a boat, not just one way, because that's not how life works. We humans work very well together. So why should we change that when we go to sea and only let part of the population on the boat?
Many women are increasingly organising themselves in company networks. What is the situation in the sailing world?
I think the sailing world can be quite difficult for women. When I first started sailing, it would have been helpful if there had been places for women to share ideas, like communities. I didn't feel like there was a community where I could talk about things like "I want to change this", "I want to do that" or "I have an idea here". I didn't feel like that was really open before, but I think it's improved a lot since then. Even in my little sailing community in Newport, Rhode Island, in the US, we have a really great group of women who sail in the pro world. When one of the women comes forward and says, "I think we need a raise. We should get more money," then we get together and say, "Hey, I think we need a raise. We should get more money". That's really reassuring because you don't feel so alone. You have a community that understands what it's like to feel like you're worth less and supports you in fighting for what you believe in or what you deserve. They're like little cheerleaders who make sure you ask the right questions and get what you deserve.
You once mentioned in an interview that Ellen MacArthur is a very interesting person for you, especially because of her book "Taking on the World". What inspired you so much?
I read her book for the first time in 2018 when I was on a delivery. I was working for a skipper at the time, and I remember I started crying the moment she was at the awards ceremony, and she was only 24 years old. And she was crying. A woman on the main stage, crying. The press was horrible to her. The guy who won was mean too. It just broke my heart. She was only 24 - so young - and had done such a great job. She nearly won, you know, and the media treated her so badly, said she was weak for showing emotion. Something inside me really clenched. I thought, we have to change that. We have to allow not only women but also men to show real emotions, because real emotions are the basis of our relationship with each other. It's the way we treat each other. It's the way you treat children and older people, you know? We're all human beings here. That moment affected me a lot because she showed the true emotions of the pain she felt when she lost first place after giving it her all. She had given it her all, right to the end. That was such a poignant moment. I cried at that scene in the book, there was just something about it.
Two of my daughters have just finished school. What advice would you give them about starting out in life?
I would say that you don't have to know right away what you want to do for the rest of your life, and you shouldn't torture yourself with the thought that you have to do it. I've noticed that a lot of my friends and my sister think that. "Oh, I have to go to school for that." "Once I do that, that's it forever." But actually, it's not like that. I mean, I was an artist, I was studying towards a PhD and now I'm a professional sailor. So I really believe that you don't have to prepare for life now, you can just enjoy it. Because one day you're going to have a lot of bills to pay, phone bills, car bills, house bills, you're going to have needy children and so on. Now is the perfect time to just play, enjoy life and find out who you really are and what you want to be. Now is the right moment.
Interview: Ralf Löwe, Kiel-Marketing.
