Women Sailors

Heartbreak on high seas for woman sailor

January 6, 2025

By David Pendered

Jan. 6 – Heartbreak came in the form of a mast that collapsed onto her racing sailboat nearly a thousand miles south of Australia. Now just five women are left to compete in the male-dominated 2024-25 Vendée Globe.

“I don’t know what happened,” British skipper Pip Hare said in a video broadcast from the Medallia dated Dec. 16, 2024. “Medallia just took off, landed, and when it landed the mast came down in two pieces. That’s the end of our 2024 Vendée Globe race.”

The mast collapsed on British sailor Pip Hare’s boat almost 1,000 miles south of Australia during the 2024-25 Vendée Globe race. (Credit: Vendée Globe)

Hare quickly recovered her fighting spirit. She is, after all, a fighter. Hare made headlines before the 2020-21 Vendée Globe with her observation that, “More men have walked on the moon than have completed the Vendée Glove, which is all the inspiration I need to succeed.”

Hare went on to finish that race, placing 19^th in a fleet of 25 boats that finished. Twelve women have since completed the race, the same as the number of men who’ve walked on the moon.

In the post-dismasting podcast, Hare told viewers she’s fine. The boat was “pretty unscathed” and moving at about 4.5 miles an hour under a mast and sail Hare jury-rigged. She thanked her sponsors and supporters who’ve stood by her in the years of preparation for this campaign.

Then Hare looked ahead.

“It’s not the end,” Hare said. “It never is the end. And I hope by the time I get to shore, I have a really good plan to get Medallia sailing again, and get back to Europe, and get back on the race track in 2025.”

Watch the video Hare posted about the dismasting. It run 3:37 minutes.

British sailor Pip Hare enters Melbourne’s harbor with a jury-rig that brought her to safety after a dismasting far south of Australia. (Credit: Team Medallia via Vendée Globe.)

Some thought Hare never would get on the race track. Hare has overcome age and gender bias to raise money and campaign on the world’s male-dominated blue-water sailboat racing circuit. Now 50, Hare was in her 40s in 2018 when she launched the Pip Hare Ocean Racing Team with a crowd-fund and a bank loan that provided the equivalent of about U.S. $30,000 in today’s dollars, according to her website.

Hare sailed into Melbourne’s harbor in a photo dated Dec. 29, 2024. The docks were crowded with well-wishers. Vendée Globe posted Hare’s thoughts about the ordeal on her page on the race’s website. Here it is:

“Right now I feel really grateful, incredibly humbled by all of the people that have given time and energy to help me, the people that turned up to welcome me here. It is a massive loss. But I am also quite proud, proud to have rescued myself and stood by the philosophy that I have always had around seamanship, and around the fact that if we choose to take these risks, if we choose to race around the world on our own, we need to be responsible for ourselves. And I feel that is what I have done and I am quite proud of that.”