Solo round-the-world sailor Cole Brauer: ‘The first two weeks I cried every single day’

At only 30 years old she has already conquered the world. Petite, upbeat and outspoken, Cole Brauer recently sailed alone non-stop around the globe in just 130 days, closely documenting her trip on social media. As the only woman to take part in the Global Solo Challenge and the youngest participant, she came second out of 16, behind Frenchman Philippe Delamare.

After a lot of chasing, the Guardian caught up with her for an exclusive interview at the Annapolis Sailboat Show on the Eastern Shore.

“Unfortunately, the mold of a sailor is something that is so far-fetched that […] most people never get into sailing,” she says.

But Cole Brauer wanted to do something different. And she is confident she has won in more than one way. The stereotype of the “white man, larger, wealthy, you know. Breaking that mold into pieces was kind of the goal,” she says with a grin.

If the half a million followers she has gathered on Instagram are anything to go by, she certainly has succeeded. And as Lydia Mullan her media manager suggests in an article of her own, Brauer’s biggest fans are women aged 55 to 65 who no doubt admire her for taking an opportunity that previous generations missed out on.

Cole Brauer, the girl who “didn’t grow up in a yacht club”, has been fortunate to get financial backing from a sponsor who is more of a philanthropist, supporting her throughout and demanding little in return. Not even publicity. But it hasn’t always been that way. Despite her athlete parents deliberately giving her a gender-neutral name at birth, Brauer has faced discrimination for being a woman and, at 5ft 2in and only 100 pounds, for her size.

“You just can’t have a fear of rejection,” she says. “I was rejected thousands and thousands of times. I was told horrible things. And every time I would still at the end of every single tryout […] I would smile and say, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and I would walk away.”

Thankfully she finds resilience in her sense of humor: “And then I would just talk shit about them, which I still do, actually,” she adds laughing.

But Brauer is more than a feminist. She is aware of sailing’s elite status and wants to take her mission a step further by making her beloved sport accessible to all. And in true millennial fashion, she has achieved this by posting daily videos on Instagram throughout her four month or so trip, whether she is doing her laundry, dancing on the deck, appearing in pajamas on Christmas Day or holding back tears after a 20-foot wave in the Southern Ocean threw her across the boat and injured her ribs.

“I wanted to show that yes, if you’re a woman, yes, if, even if you’re a man, if you’re young, if you’re small, if you are part of these minority demographics, if you don’t have any money, or if you have tons of money, but you don’t know what you’re doing with your life, everything was to try to be relatable.”

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 wooed her audience made up of sailing enthusiasts with self-deprecating quips and insight into her relationship with her family. Brauer mentioned how access to the internet through Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite gave some normalcy to her life on the boat, as she could settle down to watch Netflix and have coffee every morning with her mother over FaceTime.

As she stood on a huge stage in her Uggs and leggings, the sailing champion describes how, at the start of her solo trip, she called her mother at 4am: “The first two weeks, I cried every single day, hysterically, like a blubbering mess of a human. And finally, amazingly, my mother, who did not want me to do this at all […] my mom just goes, ‘Well, you know, like, grow up. This is what you wanted to do.’”

Jokes aside, Brauer has strong opinions around corporate sponsors and the pressure they put on athletes. She wants sailing to be an inclusive sport where competitive sailors can win without putting their sanity and physical health at risk.

With a degree in Food Science and Human Nutrition from the University of Hawaii, Brauer stresses the importance of eating well, staying hydrated and getting proper sleep throughout the race, something she feels many of her male counterparts forego.

In order to be able 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 by yourself means you cannot afford to make mistakes. “If something goes wrong, you hear a bang and or you hit something, or whatever it is, you need to be able to have the energy to react to it […]” That is where being healthy and rested comes in. As well as proper planning, she insists.

But while she wants to make sailing more inclusive, she attributes much of her success to the unique kind of backing she received. “There was absolutely zero 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. They only cared that I was safe, that the boat was safe.”

The minute Brauer stepped on to dry land in A Coruña, Spain on 7 March, 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 has had little time for friends and family.

As for the future, much like athletes in other sports, she is apprehensive about the toll competitive sports can have on mental health. “I don’t know if I want to do it the way that a lot 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 they’re, you know, professional athletes.”

“And I wouldn’t do it. I’d rather just live in my van away from everyone.”

Still, rumor has it that she is eyeing another 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”.