The Women Who Took on Sailing’s Boys’ Club Get Their Due, 30 Years Later

Across more than 25 years of documentary filmmaking, director, writer, and producer Mary Mazzio has been committed to telling socially impactful stories about people shattering glass ceilings and succeeding in spaces that were never designed to welcome them. A former Olympic rower and law firm partner herself, Mazzio first turned the camera toward the fight for gender equality in sports with 1999’s A Hero for Daisy, chronicling Olympic rower Chris Ernst and the Yale women’s crew team’s now-famous protest for equal athletic facilities. In 2017’s I Am Jane Doe, she focused on a group of mothers in a legal battle over the online trafficking of their daughters, garnering nationwide attention and staggering critical acclaim. Her 2020 film A Most Beautiful Thing, based on a memoir by Arshay Cooper, told the story of the first African American public high school rowing team in the United States, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award. Again and again, Mazzio’s films show us what it looks like when disenfranchised groups of people test their limits despite the odds being stacked against them.

Mazzio’s latest documentary, Mighty Mary: Rock the Boat, narrated by Hugh Jackman and Elizabeth Banks, is an inevitable addition to this canon. Now playing in select AMC theaters, it tells the tale of Mighty Mary, the all-female sailing team that competed for the 1995 America’s Cup (the most prestigious event in yacht racing) and shook the impenetrable 144-year-old “boys’ club” institution. But the film is ultimately less about the boat and more about the women aboard it: a diverse group of Olympic rowers, experienced sailors, and determined newcomers who answered an open call and entered one of the most elite, male-dominated competitions in the world.

Mazzio’s film traces the women’s exhausting preparation, the physical demands of racing a 65-foot boat, and the disbelief they faced from competitors and commentators who assumed they were assembled as a publicity stunt. Viewers see the team learn to work as a single, highly coordinated unit while confronting the doubts and judgments that followed them both on and off the water. Ultimately, the team’s campaign was groundbreaking not because it erased the barriers around the America’s Cup, but because it made those barriers impossible to ignore.

Mighty Mary comes at a time when the sailing world is being rocked once again—by new rules, new technology, and exciting new marketing tactics designed to engage younger audiences. You could call it a “sailing renaissance”—the sport, long deemed too exclusive and out of reach, is gaining popularity with the wider public and with brands, much like Formula 1 in recent years. To bring things full circle, a high-profile screening of the movie, produced by 50 Eggs Films in partnership with Skydance Sports, will serve as the official opening celebration to formally kick off the 38th America’s Cup Preliminary Regatta in Naples on September 21, days before the racing begins.

In a recent interview with ELLE, Mazzio describes Mighty Mary as a “hidden gem” of women’s sports history—and explains why, three decades later, the story still feels unfinished.

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What first drew you to the Mighty Mary story? Do you remember the moment when you realized, this is my next film?

I was drawn to the story for many, many years. It was on my bucket list because I was on the Olympic team with a number of the women who jumped aboard as grinders [the crew members who power the boat’s mechanical systems, manually turning large handles in a circular motion to tighten and release the lines that control the sails]. So I knew about the story from the get-go, and I remember thinking, what a groundbreaking, extraordinary story, historic in nature.

We all grew up on Billie Jean King and the cultural icon she became, especially in the ’70s—not just fighting for equal pay and equal opportunity for women, but also because she defeated a man in what became this symbol that women could achieve athletically in a way that was super unusual for the ’70s. But she beat a 46-year-old hack. Fast-forward 20 years, and these women were going toe-to-toe with the finest sailors on the planet. They weren’t masters. There was no handicap. It was, here we go.

It’s a hidden gem. It’s a historic gem. I’ve known all these years that Mighty Mary’s time is coming, and this felt like the right time for so many reasons. Where we’re going as a country, it’s about resilience and believing, even when the stakes are ridiculously high, that sometimes that sheer act of belief can propel results that are extraordinary.

You were yourself an Olympic athlete in 1992, just a few years before Mighty Mary competed in the America’s Cup. Were you aware of the team’s development and the media attention it was attracting at the time?

Oh, they were beasts. They were some of the bigger, stronger women on the ’92 team—people like Amy Baltzell, Marcy Porter, Stephanie Maxwell-Pierson. If you think who might be chiseled from the gods, you would say, here’s Exhibit A and here’s Exhibit B.

Strength was going to be a deciding factor when you’re thinking of going toe-to-toe with the men in the America’s Cup. These women had to hoist hundreds of pounds of sails up and down. They had to get people up the mast. The sheer physicality was one of the reasons why, when this happened, the pundits were like, “This is a joke. This is impossible.”

You had physical strength, you had technology and the speed of the boat, and then you had the tactics and the strategy. Those three were the pillars of America’s Cup success. And of course, the men had the strength, hands down. Dennis Conner, finest sailor of his generation. They were going toe-to-toe. They were going up against the king. This is a David-and-Goliath, Herculean task, and that’s what made the story so exciting.

Was there something about this story that you felt had been misunderstood—or simply forgotten—in the 30 years since it happened?

So few people—it doesn’t matter their age—know about this story. Think about 1995: There was no Instagram. There was nothing to make it go viral. It’s so easy to miss a news day. You add the lack of technology from a media standpoint, and you have a hidden gem.

The sheer magnitude of the task ahead, the fact that most people thought it was impossible—that women simply could not do this, women could not be capable in this arena—that was super exciting to explore today.

In terms of what was different or unexplored: The men. The nuance that the men brought to this story was exceptional. The ’90s were a time when, as one of the sailors said, it was pre-Me Too. We weren’t as careful as we should have been or ought to have been. And for these sailors to look back—Paul Cayard said, “It’s important, as we think about evolving forward, that we start to move away from what our fathers taught us and lean into what our sons are learning.” What a profound statement, especially for where we are today.

We’re fraying as a country. There’s so much antagonism that we’re seeing around the world, and there’s the power of sport to bring us together. You have these fierce antagonists. [In the film,] you’ve got Dennis Conner and his team, and the other men in this arena, Young America, all these ex-Olympians and America’s Cup veterans, and then you layer gender on top of that. What does it mean to lose to a woman? Why is that the third rail?

I think those elements are what’s really unusual about this story. You have this tension and antagonism, and yet 30 years later, you can have this unifying story of a shared experience that is a really beautiful, powerful reminder of what sports can do to bring us together.

When you began making Mighty Mary, did you have any idea that it would arrive during such a consequential moment for the America’s Cup itself?

No, not a clue. It’s like a perfect storm, honestly. There’s a journalist, Magnus Wheatley, based in the U.K., who reviewed the film. He’s a sailing journalist, and he brought it to the America’s Cup’s attention and said, “Holy moly, what a story this is.”

They shared it with their Italian stakeholders in anticipation of [the regatta in] Naples, and they came back and said, “Hey, we have some ideas for you. What do you think about kicking off the 38th season with Mighty Mary being hosted in the center of Naples in September?”

I just said, “Oh, wow. ‘Blimey, crikey,’ as Hugh Jackman would say. As Elizabeth Banks would say, ‘Say what?’”

I’m curious whether you actually got out on the water during production. How much time did you spend sailing or embedded with sailors to understand what these women were doing, both physically and tactically?

The answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes—and holy shit. I get on this 65-footer because we’re out in America’s Cup-class boats filming. All the women had come back together, 30 years later, with many of the men. We had a boat of women and a boat of men.

Listen, I’m an athlete. You cannot turn that off. You can’t say, “Hey, we’re just doing this for fun. It’s for the camera.” Somebody says, “We’re going to blow the whistle. You go.” It is just instinctive. It’s muscle memory.

All of a sudden, we’re going, and the boat goes up almost 90 degrees. I’m down at the bottom because I didn’t know, and I’m like, “What’s happening?” crawling myself to the other side. I was like, “Thank God I have strong legs,” because I don’t know how a mere mortal would have been able to climb up that incline. It was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating. Extraordinary.

Credit to Dawn Riley. When all the women got together, there was some concern: Can we do this 30 years later? These boats are no joke. These are not for the faint of heart. This is not recreational sailing. And Dawn said, “We’re doing this in these boats.” She would not take no for an answer, and the sailors completely rallied.

I didn’t appreciate at the time the physicality required, even 30 years later, and the skill. I could see in real time the hoisting of the sails, the degree of strength, endurance, and communication skills from the front to the back of the boat.

If the women of Mighty Mary walked into the America’s Cup today, what do you think would be genuinely different for them?

America’s Cup technology has advanced in ways that are stunning. Back then, when the women were racing the men, there was almost greater physicality required by more of the sailors. Now you’ve got boats that are basically foil boats. They’re racing above the water. It’s insane. It’s almost like a video game. The crews are much smaller, six people, and so much of it now is geared toward technology as opposed to the sheer physical strength of the grinders.

I think that’s a very, very different atmosphere. And how would the sailors of Mighty Mary feel today? Many of them, almost all of them, are headed to Italy to see their story embraced by the Cup today. It’s such a profound validation that what they did mattered.

Sometimes that is just the power of storytelling. You can shine a light on ordinary people who had extraordinary skills, doing something that was almost ridiculous and audacious. For them to attempt that leap and now be validated for doing so by the institution that has been running since 1851 is just an amazing circular moment that is jaw-dropping.

The press notes partly describe the film as a call for girls to “get out there,” risk failure, and challenge limitations. Why was failure important to the story you wanted to tell?

Failure is underrated in the society we’re in. As an athlete myself, you learn profound lessons from failure, and our society encourages people who fail to give it up, disappear, shrivel, go back into your little hole. We don’t want to hear from you again. And yet, if you can remove the pain and the sting and the tears from failure, you learn such important lessons.

As an athlete, I used to fail all the time, and I’d have an excuse for failure every time. I had a woman who was a little bit older than I was, a triple Olympian, who said to me, “You are so talented, and until you start believing, nothing’s going to happen.” And then she said, “By the way, what is up with all the excuses you have every time you lose?” It was like being slapped across the face.

From that moment onward, I was like, I can’t have a safety net of excuses. If I’m going to go forward and try to make the Olympic team, I have to just go for it. And if I fail, I’m going to fail honestly.

Until you’re willing to dissect your failures—“maybe I’m not training hard enough, maybe I’m not doing the exercises that I really hate doing”—the stuff you hate to do, from an achievement standpoint, is exactly what you need to be doing. If I hadn’t learned from my failure, I never would have taken the leap forward.

I think the women of Mighty Mary learned profound lessons from failure, and I think that failure has to happen to be able to springboard you to the next level.

This interview has been edited and condensed.