Neus Ballester (Palma, 20 years old) is used to the sea, but has barely touched salt water in recent months. Helmsman of Sail Team BCN, the host team of the women’s America’s Cup, begins the competition this Sunday with very few hours of training at sea. Without an AC40 (the sailboat model) of their own and with the losses of some pillars of the team, the path of Ballester and her teammates has been like an obstacle course. “But we are not going to make excuses,” he warns.
Lack of time prevented the team from finding enough funds to get their own boat to train on. The organization announced in March 2022 the arrival of the Copa del América in Barcelona, but it was soon evident that there would be no Spanish ship. Money was missing. Without the majority of the large Ibex 35 companies behind it, Foundation 0 and CaixaBank are its main sponsors. Initial calculations estimated that the project required about eight million euros to aspire to high levels, but finally it was decided to train in a simulator and rent a boat sporadically from Orient Express (France) in exchange for about 30,000 euros per day.
Preparing for the Copa del América without barely being able to navigate is as if the Spanish soccer team had trained tactics before the Euro Cup final playing Fifa [ahora FC24]: learning is always more limited. “At the beginning of the week I got on the boat for the second time. I have four hours of experience aboard the monohull,” admits Ballester, who regrets not having also managed to train on the high seas: “It is a little frustrating not to have been able to count on a boat because in Spain there is a lot of talent and we learn very quickly.”
The simulator is a structure about three meters long that reproduces the shape and functions of the AC40 rudder. The four sailors occupy the place they will have on the boat and execute movements through a screen that simulates the waters of Barcelona. “It has helped us a lot, but we lacked hours of water,” admits Mònica Azon, team coach. Large teams also work with simulators, but they use them to test improvements that must then be confirmed by training at sea. The case of Spain is not unique: the invited teams (those from their group, B) except Sweden do not have their own boat either. “The teams in group A (those represented in the men’s edition) and Sweden are light years away, but with the rest it is more balanced,” he says.
The first women’s America’s Cup in history aims to be a starting point to reduce the gender gap that sport also suffers from. Ballester knows this well, the only girl in the youth team that competed a few weeks ago in Barcelona in which she had the feeling that she had to prove more than the rest precisely because she was a girl. “It took a bit [encajar] my figure in the team,” he admits. “There is always a bit of mistrust with women and I did notice it on the team. Not for the youth, but a little for the older ones, who in the end don’t completely trust you. The boys always come first before us, that’s for sure,” she reflects. And to normalize his presence, he explains, he ended up mimicking some attitudes associated with masculinity. “They are less picky than me. And in the end I had to act and take things like them to show that I was like them,” he confesses.
What makes a good sailor? “Having an innate talent for anticipating the wind, feeling the waves, noticing the behavior of the boat and knowing what is needed,” he answers. “And above all, knowing how to describe it to communicate it because you often perceive something that you don’t know how to explain,” adds this 420 world junior champion.
Ballester, daughter of the Olympic champion José Luis Ballester and Nuria Bover, 470 world champion in 1990, completes a luxury quartet with Silvia Mas (former 470 world champion in 2021), Paula Barceló (former 49er world champion in 2020 ) and Maria Cantero (fifth in the world in 49er 2022). Tamara Echegoyen, Olympic medalist, world champion and former leader of the Sail Team BCN, will not be there. The Spanish flag bearer in Paris 2024 left the project on September 9 to focus on “other professional projects,” both parties justified; three months after the departure of Guillermo Altadill, project director. “In the end it has been a difficult process. Tamara’s loss may affect us a little more because she was already on the boat, but I can’t say much more. “It has been complicated for everyone,” he closes.
