OGR REPORT
THE 2023-24 OCEAN GLOBE RACE
Being the first all-female crew to win a round-the-world race is seismic in itself, but the diverse nationalities of the crew are just as significant for the future of sailing
The all-female Maiden crew have again made history, sailing 28,000 miles around the world to win the Ocean Globe Race. Heather Thomas is the first female British skipper to win a round-the-world race and her team aboard Maiden, backed by Tracy Edwards MBE, are the first all-female crew to win a global race. It doesn’t get better than this. Fourteen crews set out from Cowes on 10 September on the adventure of a lifetime, full of expectations for a race around the world. Seven months later, 10 returned, all changed by the experience – some saying they wanted to do it all again.
One of those was Heather Thomas, the skipper of the all-female crew aboard Maiden, in which Tracy Edwards and her team made history 34 years earlier by becoming the first all-female crew to compete in a round-the-world race.
Back then, Tracy and her Whitbread crew won two of the legs and finished 2nd in class, returning home to Cowes to a hero’s welcome. Heather and her team took the next step – winning the Ocean Globe Race outright! And Heather Thomas didn’t just win, she and her second generation Maiden crew thrashed the other 13 teams in a boat that had already raced four times around the globe.
Thomas, at 27, the youngest skipper in the fleet, was ecstatic. Talking about her crewmates, she said: ‘There is such a strong bond between us. We’ve achieved our goal of showing what women can do. I’m so proud of this crew!’
CELEBRATING DIVERSITY
This was no ordinary crew, but a crew spanning nine nationalities. Tracy Edwards recruited them from all walks of life and backgrounds during a four-year world tour to raise awareness about the millions of girls worldwide who are not able to access an education. ‘Some of our crew were selected during Maiden’s world tour, but when Tracy told us she had entered the boat in the Ocean Globe Race, we needed more people,’ says Heather. ‘We contacted sailing charities in Antigua and Africa and trialled them while we were in Cape Town. We went for women who couldn’t necessarily pay.’ One of the best examples is Najiba Noori, a refugee from Afghanistan who had fled the Taliban. Others hailed from Antigua, France, India, Italy, Puerto Rico, South Africa, the UK and USA. But this was not a tokenistic crew, they were selected for their personal and sailing qualities and their will to win.
Heather and her first mate, Rachael Burgess, trained the crew hard and the team excelled
