Lines to be first British woman in America's Cup team for 90 years

Jemima Lines has become the first British woman selected for an America's Cup squad in 90 years. The 29‑year‑old was named to the GB1 team for next year’s event, which will be the first edition in the competition’s 175‑year history to require at least one woman in each five‑person crew. “It has been a agelong clip coming,” Lines told BBC Sport. She described the selection as “It is incredible, what a infinitesimal successful past and it is conscionable truthful exciting, I deliberation it is simply a pivotal infinitesimal for our athletics really.” Lines added, “It honestly is simply a monolithic honour and rather surreal. If you had told maine that increasing up I wouldn't person believed it.” Phyllis Sopwith remains the last British woman to have sailed aboard a British America's Cup challenger, competing in 1934 and 1937. Lines, a former kitefoiler with the British Sailing Team, served as Team GB’s backup to eventual gold medallist Ellie Aldridge at the Paris 2024 Olympics. She holds a degree in mechanical engineering and has previously worked as a guide at Everest basecamp, summited mountain peaks and set altitude kite‑surfing records. Her sense of adventure, she says, stems from her late father, Ralph Crathorne, a former British special forces worker who died in an accident on Ben Nevis earlier this year. Asked what he would think of her role with GB1, Lines said, “He would conscionable perfectly emotion it, helium was an implicit fable and an unthinkable adventurer.” She continued, “Every athletics I person ever done, we person done arsenic a household and that pb maine to this. He pb maine to this really.” The 38th America's Cup is scheduled for Naples, Italy, in 2027, with racing beginning in May and the final Match set for 10‑11 July. Lines will also contribute to the design squad, using her engineering background to help create the tools the GB1 crew will employ on the AC75. She joins Bleddyn Mon, Dylan Fletcher, Ben Cornish and Andrea Tesei in the GB1 lineup. “The anticipation is monolithic for this 1 and each I tin accidental is that coming into this squad you tin consciousness the buzz successful the air,” Lines said. She added, “It is conscionable a spot afloat of legends, from the sailors to everyone moving here. There is that regular thrust and determination is nary waiting around.” Lines concluded, “I deliberation the squad arsenic a full is expectational and I don't truly privation to springiness the crippled away.” Finally, she noted, “It is simply a plan situation archetypal off, past you instrumentality it to the h2o and that is the breathtaking happening that the contention has already started and the remainder is yet to come.”