CENTER OF EFFORT
These young Rolex Yachtswomen of the Year are blazing their own path, lock and step
These young Rolex Yachtswomen of the Year are blazing their own path, lock and step.
You won’t hear the Cowles twins singing their way to the finish line of a close race. But if their last race took something out of them, you might hear a tune rising while they recharge. Or maybe they’re on top of the world, and they need to let it rip. Are they the only team that sings on the racecourse? “Oh no, but I’m not sure everybody will admit it.”
Maybe that is Carmen speaking. She’s older and wiser by 2 minutes. Or is it Emma? When two people are as close as these two, does it matter? At 18, the Cowles twins are a success story, US Sailing’s 2018 Rolex Yachtswomen of the Year and quickly stepping up to new challenges in a new class. The first experience for Emma and Carmen in their new ride, an Olympic 470, was practicing against their former fleet of International 420s. There was no point speed testing against slower boats, Emma says, “So we worked on boathandling in a boat that loads up a lot more quickly. That was in our favor when we finally did our first race in a 470 fleet, and we had never crossed another 470, and we weren’t used to the closure rates. It went something like this: “‘Are we going to cross?’ “Yes, we’ll cross. “Maybe not. “Tack, tack, tack!” The key to the voting for the Rolex award was the twins’ overwhelming win, seven bullets in nine races at the 2018 World Sailing Youth Worlds in the i420, their second consecutive Youth Worlds win. This was backed by high finishes in open i420 regattas: The North Americans, for example, where they placed third overall, and Kiel Week, fourth overall as the top girls’ team in both events.
Call it the culmination of stepping into Optis at age 9 when their parents, cruising members of Larchmont YC, started them in the junior program simply to get them comfortable on the waters of Long Island Sound, never imagining their latent killer instincts.
When the twins started
winning, however, inner fires ignited, and eventually they joined the Long Island Sound Optimist Team, gaining access to the benefits of world class coaching. That phase of their careers peaked with Carmen first and Emma second in the 2015 Girls Nationals, 1 point apart. The next phase opened as they aged out of Optis and, “Our parents weren’t going
About turning two skippers into a team: “There is a foundation of trust built on knowing that we have two skippers in the boat.”
to support two boats,” Emma relates. “If we wanted to keep sailing—and that wasn’t even a conversation—we had to start sailing together.”
What came next laid the groundwork for today and beyond. Settling into the i420 as middle teens with Emma, an inch taller and a few pounds heavier, taking on the trapeze and recalling now, “Against the fleet, we were light, so we were underdogs. It was a matter of saying, ‘let’s see what we can do with what we’ve got.’” And about turning two skippers into a team: “There is a foundation of trust built on knowing that we have two skippers in the boat.”
From Carmen’s point of view, “We come from the same place. With everything I ever learned in an Opti, Emma was there. With everything Emma learned, I was there. If she compares a situation to something that happened in a different regatta, I’m right there with her.”
Emma adds, “And if we’re in a situation, we know how the other will react, what she’s going to need.”
“If we’ve had a bad race,” Carmen says, “I like to talk about it. Emma wants a quiet boat, so we have it both ways. We go quiet, and then it’s time to ask, ‘how do we get back into this.’”
Thus we confirm identical twins are not quite identical after all, but the relationship between “best friends” cuts through a heap of getting- toknow- you. Our conversation took place the morning after the girls received their Rolexes, with LISOT coach Steve Keen in company, and for Keen’s two cents, “I’ve sailed with siblings a lot. It can be a blessing or a curse. You might say something to a sibling that you would never say to anyone else.”
True enough, and Emma agrees, “But we’re sisters. It’s a full partnership, and we’ve learned a lot about [this comes with a grin] being a couple. On the water, we can be pretty vocal, and I think people who hear us are surprised when we come off the water and we’ve already turned the page.” Turning the page could mean revisiting a few bars from Imagine Dragons: You made me a believer, believer. You break me
down, you build me up, believer … “For every regatta we have a song,” Carmen says. “It has to be a song we can sing. In Corpus Christi last year for the Youth Worlds, we’d play Kokomo over a speaker while the U. S. boys were launching. At first, they weren’t exactly comfortable with full-blast Beach Boys, but they got into it.” Aruba, Jamaica, oh I wanna
take ya …
And it didn’t hurt that the U.S. sailors quickly turned up the mojo to deliver four gold medals, one silver and the Nations Trophy for best national team.
Having spent time with family in Belgium and Spain, speaking French and Spanish, the twins can switch languages if they need to talk “in code”— but their very American regatta diet relies on peanut butter and jelly and keeping things familiar, whether the setting is Sanya, China or Kiel, Germany.
Keen observes, “One of the strengths that Carmen and Emma possess is an ability to learn from mistakes, even when mistakes are hard to swallow.”
Carmen adds: “We’re hungry. We’re always ready to ask what we did wrong, and we like the role of underdogs.”
Call that good, because in the 470 they’re underdogs again, and it’s not as though the 470 dinghy isn’t a famously tweakable not-quite-one-design with latitude on masts, foils and more. And it’s not as though the twins haven’t been named to the US Sailing Team Squad for a shot at selection in one of the most challenging Olympic classes. And it’s not as though this isn’t a heady moment in their young lives, leaving parents to shake their heads in wonder at what their progeny have become, and are becoming. The Cowles twins are not the house bet for a 2020 Olympic berth, but ….
This year brings races in Japan and Europe, Emma says, “and a focus on process, process, process. For each of our youth worlds we had a training arc designed to peak at those times, with regattas right after the worlds because we thought we wanted to extend. Now we know that we need time after the big ones to decompress. There were rough moments in those extra regattas.”
The twins are accepted at Yale— something about engineering and business— with the understanding they will take a gap year before joining the oldest collegiate sailing club in the world.
One element of a gap year, Keen says, “is learning to manage time so they keep learning.” To this point, time has been managed— if not over managed— by circumstance. Not counting a jam- packed 2018, there was Project Pipeline sailing in Miami in January with the Olympic Development Program, then a flight home for midterms. Then it was back to Miami for the 470 North Americans.
“We missed our middle school graduation because we were off at a training camp,” Carmen says. “We look forward to not having to fit school around sailing and sailing around school. We just might miss our high school graduation this spring, though, because it’s right around Kiel Week.”
There’s probably a song for that too. Q
The twins are accepted at Yale— something about engineering and business— with the understanding they will take a gap year before joining the oldest collegiate sailing club in the world.