When Cole Brauer first arrived on the scene for the grueling round-the-world, single handed 2023 Global Solo Challenge, she wasn’t the most intimidating sailor. The sole female competitor in a field of 16, she stood just over five feet tall and barely broke 100 pounds. She had been recently eliminated from another ocean race under the excuse that she was “too short for the Southern Ocean.”
But Brauer was packing punches no one saw coming: beyond being a competent, fearless racer, she also had a media team that knew a good story when they saw it. And Brauer was storytelling gold.
The fact that the “media team” was also a petite female sailor in her mid-20s—and not a large agency in New York or LA—came as a bit of a surprise, too.
Enter Lydia Mullan, managing editor for SAIL Magazine and an offshore racer herself. She first met Brauer when she covered Brauer’s Bermuda 1-2 win in 2023. After a great phone conversation, Mullan offered her support in PR and media if Brauer ever needed it.
Just days ahead of the Global Solo Challenge start, when Brauer was in Spain and Mullan was on the Long Island Sound delivering a boat, she got the call that Brauer needed a media person. Was Mullan still interested in helping out? Over the roar of the engine, she struggled to hear Brauer. “Is she asking me what I think she’s asking me?” she remembers thinking.
“I knew from the beginning that Cole was compelling,” Mullan says. “She’s charismatic and has high energy, and she’s a fresh voice in the sailing world. So, I had some sense that she would resonate with people. But we were all shocked with how much she exploded.”
Despite only having met once prior, Brauer and Mullan embarked upon a relationship where they communicated daily through What’s App messages, with Brauer sending clusters of video clips roughly every 18 hours. The clips could come in at all times, and since her audience was international, Mullan would stop everything to edit the clips, stitch them together, turn on captions, and tag appropriate accounts. Sometimes this would happen during the workday, sometimes not.
“Cole has her own ring tone on my phone,” she says. “It’s an alarm. For the first three months, I never got a full night of sleep because I’d get a text at 2am, 4am, and I’d get up and turn them around as quickly as possible.”
Mullan herself is an experienced offshore racer along the Eastern Seaboard, most recently making her own headlines when the boat she was racing during the Newport-Bermuda Race, the J/122 Alliance, collided with a submerged object and sank. As a competent offshore sailor who knew the environment intimately, Mullan had an idea of the off-the-water criticisms Brauer would face as a female racer, so she decided to affectively address this with her storytelling. And through her professional work with SAIL, she knew how to liaise with other media outlets to get her storytelling out to wider audiences.
“Having worked in the sailing industry, being a young woman and having similarities to Cole, I knew that some people would not take her seriously because I also had to deal with that same struggle for credibility,” she says. “I was acutely aware that we had to build something more than an Instagram account, getting her legitimized by media that would give her voice more power. It was something I was very aware of so that Cole didn’t have to be aware of it at all.”
Mullan’s efforts helped put Cole’s face in People Magazine and the The New York Times. NBC had multiple clips of Cole’s progress thanks to Mullan’s liaising, along with CBS News and the Today Show. “I could anticipate some of the criticism that she might face and the questions people would have, and then make a plan for the media to head it off.”
Brauer ended up finishing second in the Global Solo Challenge, but if there’s any disappointment to be found in her finish, it’s not from within her audience. Her achievements broke through a glass ceiling that has existed for women and men alike.
By the time she finished the race, Brauer’s Instagram following had swelled to nearly half a million people. Many of them were women who found inspiration in the boldness of her solo endeavor. Many on the Bay followed her progress and cheered her on from afar.
As Brauer herself acknowledged on social media: “For far too long sailing and racing have been in the shadows, maybe partially due to its attempts to keep its ‘traditions,’ but those ‘traditions’ have also pushed really amazing sailors out of the industry due to burnout rates and unnecessary exclusivity. This hasn’t been easy one bit, but it makes it all worth it to see that we are taking this industry from the dark and bringing it into the light.”
Both women are in Annapolis this week during the Annapolis Sailboat Show.
Lydia Mullan will be moderating a conversation between Cole Brauer and another high-level ocean sailor, Lin Pardey, on Friday at 4 p.m. at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Limited tickets are still available for this special event. We at CBM wouldn’t miss it.
