This is a story of an Australian athlete Jess Muir who had a dream to be the first female Queensland Athlete to represent Australia in Sailing in the 49erFX event at LA2028/BNE2032 Olympics. This dream has been shattered. This story is highlighting how resilient the athlete talent in Australia is; and the opportunity we have to support it.
Jess Muir is 20 years old; and earlier this year was in the midst of a campaign to represent Australia at the Olympics as a 49erFX sailor. Jess comes from a family of national champion male sailors and set out while in high school to continue on the legacy but didn’t realise at the time how hard it would be as a female. The financial reality of being a female self-funded sailor, and without the right support around her, became too much and her Olympic dream is now set aside. Six months on, Jess has redirected her energy into changing the system for future female sailors by giving them the support she needed with the creation of Water Women. This is her story.
When Jess was seven years old, her Dad a world champion sailor, enrolled her in the Learn to Sail Tackers program at Manly’s Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron. She didn’t fall in love with sailing at first sight, in fact dreaded it and after that first taste, continued happily pursuing many other sports instead.
Many years later on a family trip to Tasmania when Jess was 14, she realised sailing was in her blood when visiting the annual Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart. She saw on display two wooden cadet dinghy’s created by hand by her Pop to go alongside her Great Grandfather’s hand crafted family wooden boat Trevassa, a boat very well-known in Tassie. Jess learnt her family history of convicts, lighthouse keepers, boat builders and sailors, with her entire ancestry on her Dad’s side filled with amazing yachtsman.
Recounted by Jess, “One night I remember very clearly is a family dinner at the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania. We walked in past a hallway of trophies and I was casually reading their inscriptions and then I saw my Dad’s name on one of them. I yelled out to my Dad, ‘Dad your name is on here!’ and then my brother yelled a few steps ahead, ‘Your name is on this one too!’. This is the first time I realised how good a sailor my Dad actually was and how much humility he had. His name was on five different trophies for National Champion results in lots of different classes. It was at that time that I realised I needed to keep this legacy alive and needed to get back into sailing. Jess’s promise became her dream, “I was going to be the one to carry on the family name as a female in a sport that had been passed down for generations.”
On arriving back in Brisbane, Jess signed up to sailing at her school Lourdes Hill College and proceeded to compete for them at a lot of regattas. Wanting more, Jess re-joined the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron and decided she wanted to buy a 29er, as it was the fastest and coolest boat around and she was adamant to show the boys how it was done. Fortunately for Jess her Mum and Dad bought her the 29er, but it was one of the oldest in the fleet with leaks and sails made of 70% sail tape. Needing some serious TLC, Jess spent the next month of weekends by herself pulling every single fitting off the deck, resealing it, regripping the hull, polishing every nook and cranny and replacing the ropes. Jess distinctly remembers sitting at the dinner table one night and saying to her parents, “I’m going to make the state team in this class”. Their response made her even more determined, “Darling, don’t get your hopes up. You’re not as good as the others and you will never be as you don’t have the youth experience. But just do your best.”
Doing her best meant making a state team against the odds. Normally the pathway is competing in youth classes to win first in a national championship and be selected to represent Australia at the Youth Worlds. But Covid-19 intervened and nationals didn’t exist for two important years. So Jess stepped up her training during Covid lockdown driving up to Lake Cootharaba, Noosa every weekend to train with her skipper Seish. They placed Top 10 in the NSW/ACT Championships and qualified as the female team with a Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS) training partners’ contract. Jess was beside herself on receiving this contract – this was the support she needed. At her first training camp, Jess received her QAS uniform, drove from the Gold Coast home and walked upstairs to her Mum and Dad, and said, “Remember when you told me I would never make a state team? I did it!”.
Looking back now Jess realises she wanted to prove to herself and her parents she could be successful, and wanted her Dad to be proud of her. There were so many times Jess was told she would never make it in sailing by many people at the club. “I was told I was not strong enough. I wouldn’t win as I didn’t have the newest boat. I don’t weigh enough to beat the boys.” All of these comments fuelled Jess’s fire. She was determined to prove them all wrong and to show she could reach any goals she put her mind to. Jess’s inspiration were females who had succeeded in sailing – Stacey Jackson, Mara Stransky, her coach Annie Eastgate were her biggest idols and mentors.
One day on the lawn out the front of the yacht club, Jess was transfixed by a girl rigging up a 49erFX (female Olympic class). It was beautiful, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off that boat. Jess knew from that day on she was going to sail a 49erFX. A few years later Jess discovered that girl had never pursued competing in the boat; and so there had never been in history a Queensland 49erFX team compete at an event. Her new goal was set.
Finance was always Jess’s biggest battle as an athlete. Other athletes’ campaigns are funded by wealth in their family but this wasn’t a reality in Jess’s world. What this did do for Jess is focus more on what she could control to be as good as can be such as hard work, dedication, looking after her boat, attitude, fitness. There is no financial support in sailing until you make the elite level. You can’t get a sponsor without results and you can’t get results without self-funding money for the boat and travelling and competing at national and world championships. Looking back now Jess sees how stressful this was and how it impacted her mental and physical health.
But Jess had a goal and her parents bought her a $23,000 second-hand boat to compete in the 49erFX class after securing a full time contract with QAS. Jess appreciates and sees the sacrifices her parents made for her. Every time sails are replaced every couple of regattas, it’s approximately $10,000. Sailing gear on top of that is another $2,000. Plus spares of blocks, ropes, fittings. Then you have to transport your boat to a regatta and pay for accommodation, food, insurance and regatta fees. Just two regattas in 2022 cost Jess’s parent’s $10,000. Add it all up and Jess realises it’s on the way to a house deposit.
For Jess to gain more sports funding, she needed to get into the Australian Sailing Futures Program. This meant self-funding to attend several regattas and camps every year in various locations around Australia. In the summer of 2022-23 Jess travelled down to Sydney for nationals and shared a house with other competition sailing girls. This was one of the most fun and memorable times Jess has had in her campaign, getting to know the girls immersed and humbled in conversations and life about sailing. But towards the end of the regatta, Jess’s boat was failing, with the sail track completely ripped off the mast on Day 1, repaired and continuing to rip the sail every time it was hoisted up the mast. On the last day the mainsail had completely torn down the bolt rope – after a year using it every training session and regatta it had held up and now at the most inopportune time it decided to break. Jess couldn’t afford a new mainsail and called her Dad to see if he knew anyone who could fix it as she had paid to travel to the next regatta in Melbourne. Desperate, Jess went back to the share house, told the girls her situation and asked them if they know of any sailmakers. One of the girls just turned and said without a second thought, “You can use one of our sails”. Jess didn’t’ want to risk breaking it so said to her she’d buy it. Then her response was “Okay you can have it for $500” (new sails are $3000!). “We have another eight new sails at home”. Jess couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The conversation amongst the girls then turned to their planned trip to Europe next year in a new van they’d bought to tour while competing in regattas for three months. The boat and container of new spares were already in Europe waiting for them.
This was the breaking point for Jess. She called her Mum that night, crying, and said, “Mum, I am so out of my league here. These girls don’t have to work. They do uni online. They have brand new boats, eight sets of sails, they’re going to live and travel in Europe for half the year. I can’t compete with that. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
Jess came home, added up what the summer had cost them. Jess’s parents had separated and her now single Mum was living in her parent’s home as she couldn’t afford her own home. Her mum, a beautiful soul, kept saying to Jess, “Just keep trying Jbird (Jess’s nickname), and I will support you as much as I can.” Jess would sit in her room at night and cry at the thought of taking her mum’s money from her. It came down to Jess feeling it was too selfish an act to keep taking her Mum’s money and just couldn’t keep doing it.
Her parents realised they couldn’t continue funding her campaign. Jess hadn’t even made it overseas yet. To be told you couldn’t continue a dream pursue goals you’d worked really hard for was really tough on Jess but she realised it was out of her control. To even think about qualifying for the Olympic Australian team you need to own a boat overseas and spend the summer travelling Europe to compete for international results. You need the results to be selected. It came down to not mattering how many times Jess showed up at the gym, how many water sessions she did every week, how many hours of boat work she did, it was never going to be enough. Jess would never have a new boat or even more than one set of sails.
Jess’s belief now is in this world and in this life everything happens for a reason. She believes in a glass half full attitude and directed her energy into thinking about why this was happening to her. And that’s when Water Women was born. Her why is, “If I couldn’t compete at an Olympic level myself, I’m going to use everything I had to make it easier for other girls to succeed. Water Women is a platform for me to share with up and coming girls my knowledge and experience in my years of dedication to the sport of sailing and in my short time in high performance.”
Jess believes she needed to go through all of the tough times to know what it’s really like and to make sure that girls in sailing who want to journey down the elite pathway have someone to talk to about their experiences. There are different pathways out there for women in sailing, and her experience is that one path might now work, but another might. It took Jess a while to figure that out on her own and she struggled not having anyone to reach out to after the QAS ceased their support.
And now only six months on from the devastation of no longer being able to compete in high performance, Jess is loving her life. She’s in her second year of physiotherapy, working as a physio aide, sports trainer and a coach for sailing. Jess believes her decision made is a good one and she’s now free to give her time to others without the tight schedule of living as an athlete. Jess has learnt the importance of choosing happiness above everything else and looks back to see the stress she had financially, mentally and physically created struggles as a female athlete in body weight, eating and anxiety. She looks back and sees she was not herself and wants to be there for other females in sport. Water Women is up and running with weekly catchups for the girls in sailing at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Manly. Jess is motivating the girls in the gym and on the water and recently helped the 29er girls leading up to a regatta, with them placing second overall and first females. Jess said, “They were so excited to learn how to sail the boat properly and the little tips and tricks I used to find helpful. After the regatta I received the most beautiful message from them saying how grateful they were, and it has become of on the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had.”
Jess knows now her lack of finances to follow her own Olympic dream has created a silver lining. She has a purpose to be a role model and inspire young females to be better sailors and all round holistic humans. Over the last couple of months Jess has brought together a group of Water Women who are completely changing the dynamic at the yacht club. At the end of the day there’s a lack of female sailors in Queensland because there hasn’t been a support system for girls at the club. The segregations based on gender, and which class you sail meant there hasn’t been a group of girls to be there on the journey for each other. Jess witnessed so many girls dropping out in late teens due to lack of support and funding. While Jess can’t solve the funding issue, she can solve the support issue and the small amount of work so far with Water Women means girls are coming together across classes and hanging out. They have so many things in common and are forming a strong bond of friendship, something we have not seen before at RQ.
Jess’s own dream of becoming an Olympian sailor is over at this point in time. She learnt so much from her years as an athlete and believes she’s become a better human with gratefulness for that chapter. But the dream for Jess with a lack of funding and support was a false reality. My goals and dreams now compared to six months ago are very different. Now Jess is striving to be a part of and support other young females in sport, giving my time to see them do what Jess wasn’t fortunate enough to do. The Water Women girls are starting to make podiums at regattas, but more importantly they are doing it smiling and happy as they have a tribe of girls to hang out with. Next Jess is planning on starting a podcast to share stories of women in our sailing community across Australia about their experiences as female sailors. Jess wants to build a community of women who can fight for their goals and break down the barriers of females in sailing. Jess is mentoring girls who are still being told they’re not strong enough, they need to put on more weight, and questioning who did their boat work. Jess believes it’s time to break down those barriers and create a community of powerful women who are physically and mentally tough … and happy. Jess believes the secret to creating the next generation of sailors is teamwork. She reminds the girls that every single person you meet at the club could be a person you end up sailing with. Jess believes the more support girls can give each other, the more females will stay in the sport and the more options girls will have for a skipper or crew down the track. Jess believes female sailing athletes respond to a different style of coaching to find ways around brute strength to come out on top. She believes females have more finesse and different processes to foster, so focuses on targeting specific strengths. And even more importantly Jess is focusing on the mental health and wellbeing of young female athletes. The weekly rituals like a coffee catchup, a yoga class, mocktails by the bay or a run along the waterfront is the community she craved as a young solo athlete. Jess plans on making a difference in their world. And somehow, with the right support, she will do more than she will ever dream of.
Running on Empty is a research report released in August 2023 by the Australian Sports Foundation. The report's key findings included:
1. Elite athletes are in financial distress – almost half of elite athletes (46%) aged over 18 earning incomes below the poverty line
2. Mental health is declining and greater support is in high demand, with female athletes faring worse than males
3. Australia risks an exodus of elite athletes – more than half the athletes surveyed were considering leaving their sport
4. The green and gold runway needs investment in athletes
