“The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
—Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
You might have watched the 40-foot Gray Wolf win last year’s Race to Alaska (R2AK) under team We Brake for Whales and thought it impressive that for the second time, Jeanne Goussev stepped onto the dock at Ketchikan first. But only after that victory did the well-known Puget Sound sailor reveal that this was about so much more than 10K nailed to a log—first prize in the notorious/infamous race.
“Connection is one of the most important things I can have,” says Jeanne, who sailed with her husband, Evgeniy Goussev, teammate Nikki Henderson, and other members of her sailing family who helped her manage multiple sclerosis (MS) that she made public after the victory. “It was a real celebration.”
First noticing symptoms in 2020, Jeanne has spent the past four years learning about life with this incurable, chronic disease that, according to the National MS Society, affects nearly one million Americans. Women accounted for 74% of cases in a 2017 estimate. For her, every day is a bit like playing Russian roulette with symptoms.
“Every day I know I have MS, but I don’t have major symptoms every day,” she says. “My leg was all collapse-y earlier this week, but I have a cane in my trunk just in case. I haven’t pulled it out in the last month, so I’m kind of proud of that.”
Resilience, adaptability, a sense of humor, and persistence have been hallmarks of her career as a racer and sailor, and she is determined that these characteristics carry her forward.
“Somebody told me about the term antifragile,” Jeanne says. “I want to be antifragile. I don’t ever want to be a victim of my circumstances. I don’t want to sit on my hands and think, woe is me.”
A Sailor Awakes
Jeanne grew up in New England, moving to Boston after graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine. She turned to sailing on the advice of her father, who was trying to help her after she and her beau of four years had broken up.
“My dad took me by the hand and said, ‘You need a hobby, let me take you somewhere.’ And he took me to the Boston Sailing Center.”
That simple act would change her life. She quickly took to the competitive sailing scene, learning under the wing of Dave Franzel, a world champion Sonar sailor and renowned coach who founded the BSC. Every millimeter of winching was guided with care. She found herself in awe, wondering and learning the countless tiny, important details Franzel’s seasoned senses took in, and racing with him in the one-design Sonar fleet at the infamously competitive Marblehead regattas.
“You can tweak so many things on those boats that I really learned about everything,” Jeanne says. “Tension, mast rake, and trim for all the sails, body weight, and all that stuff. And it translates so well to big boats.”
She was hungry to gain real deal sea time as well. A notable experience was a January delivery from Boston to Savannah, Georgia, through hurricane force winds.
“We were in 30-foot offshore seas and wind like you’ve never seen before,” Jeanne says with a trace of a smile. “We got hammered. I got off that boat and I was like, ‘I love this. I want to do this forever.’ ”
She also found another love at the sailing center—her husband-to-be, Evgeniy Goussev, who worked there. Buoyed with youthful vigor, world class mentorship, the sailor love of her life, and an insatiable passion for racing, Jeanne signed up for the 2002 New World Challenge, what was to be “the first BT Global challenge race that started in the U.S. and goes around the world against prevailing winds and currents, the wrong way around the world.”
Among the youngest competitors, she secured corporate sponsorship that included two years of training with the race organizers. But it all blew up with the tech bubble burst. Jeanne never got to sail that race.
“I feel like I got a good taste of it, and ever since, it was always on my bucket list to do something like that.” She and Evgeniy ultimately moved to the Puget Sound area where they started a family, and she prioritized her financial sector career.
About 10 years ago, the Goussevs were on the market for the racing sailboat of their dreams. They found her in Gray Wolf.
“I always say Gray Wolf is the boat we married,” Jeanne says. The Rodger Martin-designed, Lyman-Morse-built racer-cruiser is a one-of-a-kind fantasy for the right owner. The cold molded wood hull, water ballast, and unstayed carbon rig are a rare combination of features.
“She was a pretty cutting-edge offshore ocean racer,” Jeanne says. “She was built for really hard ocean racing. She has a freestanding mast…bends like a noodle. It’s crazy.”
And, she sails like the competitive sailing dinghies of Jeanne’s background—nimble, quick, and eminently tweakable to really get her humming to her full potential.
“She’s a big physics challenge every time you’re on deck,” Jeanne says with a smile. “The wind direction and wind strength and everything—you can’t tune her in and dial her right in the way I knew how…you don’t just pin her down for the conditions you’re in and just go out and sail. There’s nothing to pin her down with, she doesn’t have any shrouds. It’s always moving things around.
“She’s complicated like that, and that’s why I love her,” Jeanne says, freely associating herself with Gray Wolf. “She’s not an easy boat to sail, but we can handle her…she’s one of those boats that’s just such a pleasure to sail. And I look at her lines, and every time I see her, I fall in love again.”
The R2AK
It was aboard Gray Wolf, after the local Around the County Race, when the idea of racing in the R2AK first came up. Jeanne and her friend, Anna Stevens, were enjoying some locally made whiskey that Jeanne freely admits is “dangerously delicious.” Amid the post-race embrace of whiskey and friendship, Anna turned to Jeanne and asked if she would ever do the R2AK with an all-women crew. “Just out of the blue. And I was like, ‘Yes, I would!’ ”
Wheels began turning. What kind of boat? What kind of crew? What experience are we seeking? The details came into focus as Jeanne committed to the idea.
“For me, it was always about the experience being out there with a group of women. I thought it would be a lot of fun,” Jeanne says. But as enthusiasm grew, she realized that team Sail Like a Girl had a real shot at winning the race. “The competitive part of me starts to kick in, and I’m like, yes, I want to be on a boat that’s going to be fast. I’m not going to go out and just poke our way up north, I want a chance to do this in the best and fastest way we can.”
The ride was a Melges 32 they named Maks to the Moon, an homage to her son, Maks, and the moon as guiding light. Evgeniy supplied integral technical support throughout the preparation and created the boat’s terrific stationary bike pedal-drive system for the human-powered aspect of the race (R2AK boats cannot use any engines, only sail and/or human power).
“That was my husband’s proof of his love of his wife… there’s a love story in there somewhere,” Jeanne laughs. The 2018 race turned out to be a record low wind year, so human power was key. “We ended up using that bike for some godawful number of hours, 75 hours I think.”
Armchair critics speculated that racing with seven sailors would be a detriment in terms of weight, but it turned out that well-rested sailors could ride hard at the pedal drives for many critical hours. The last bit of the race across the wet and wild Hecate Strait livened up, both in terms of weather and racing duels for the top spot.
“We were all nearly hypothermic toward the end, everything was wet. Everything was cold. Having yoga mats pasted to the walls for that extra insulation was a godsend. We would’ve been freezing our tuchuses off.”
Sail Like a Girl took their well-earned first place, energizing many onlookers as the first all-women team to win.
“It was a surprise to me coming out of the race,” Jeanne says. “I never thought that I was a sailing feminist. I didn’t pick that name to make some kind of statement. It was more lighthearted, just recognition that sailing like a girl is a sign of strength. And that’s it. But what it became after we won the race in 2018 was kind of a rallying cry in a really interesting way.”
Sail Like a Girl has since become a nonprofit founded “to inspire women to push their limits and conquer challenges through the sport of sailing.” Jeanne and the organization try to identify the barriers that keep women off the water. Educational programs, how-to guides to boat ownership and skippering, and more are part of the mission.
“It was always very obvious to me that there weren’t enough women in sailing,” Jeanne says. “I want to see that change.”
“When she and Team Sail Like a Girl won back in 2018, it was a moment that inspired generations of people, and especially women and girls,” says Jake Beattie, CEO of the Northwest Maritime Center and creator of the R2AK. “Older women—the original glass ceiling breakers—rallied to celebrate how far we had come, women in their 30s and 40s got excited enough to dream about doing more on the water, and girls who had never thought about sailing were inspired by the moment—came out to get autographs. Autographs! That win was bigger than the R2AK, and I think it inspired more young sailors and more role models than we can know until those girls grow up and we look at the demographics of the sport.”
A New Challenge
Jeanne left Ketchikan after the 2018 victory feeling like she was just getting started. While the experience was storybook, the racer within wanted to push even harder.
“The first year was more about the group of women and the adventure,” she says. “The second year was like, now I want to see what this thing is made of.” She turned to recent acquaintance Nikki Henderson, who at 25 became the youngest skipper to lead a winning team in the Clipper Round the World Race. The two had met and “sort of clicked,” and when Jeanne asked Nikki if she’d be interested in doing the R2AK, “She was like, hell yeah. She was all in. Having her on board just pushed us to another level of competition.”
The year turned out to be far windier and more competitive than 2018. Team Sail Like a Girl went all out, regularly clocking boat speeds in the high teens and over 20 knots at points and sailing “on a knife’s edge,” enduring intense surfing and many crashes in the adverse conditions. “That was the year of let’s push as hard as we can,” she says. “And we broke our rig. In the last 60 miles of the race, our spreader was pointing at the sky.”
They carried the main as high as they could below the broken spreader and limped onward, dropping from 17 knots of boatspeed to 7 and ultimately taking fourth place.
“We were so close to just really feeling like we had left it all on the table,” Jeanne says. “But it’s not the same when you break something. Then it’s like we overdid it. We did something that was too much, and we pushed too hard. And that was another feeling that I had not felt before.”
Jeanne began to feel strange aches and pains around that time in 2019. She was initially diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis in March 2020. R2AK 2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic, and a Puget Sound-wide WA360 race was organized in its stead. Maks to the Moon was set to compete, but even casual practice became an ordeal.
“Evgeniy was taking me to practice in my parents’ powerboat and dropping me off at the end of the dock…I couldn’t walk the whole gangplank,” Jeanne says. “I was on a cane. I was collapsing my legs. I was tremoring.” Her initial attitude was defiant, and she believed her condition was going to improve. But it was not to be.
“I got off the boat from that race and I was on the cane for weeks afterwards because it had taken every bit of energy out of myself to get around that course,” she admits. “That was three days in local waters. Not brutal sailing. Not heavy weather. But that’s when I knew the Melges had become too much for me and our decision to sell her…I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
Soon, Jeanne received her MS diagnosis. MS creates lesions on the brain and spinal cord, causing flare-ups of new, unpredictable symptoms. Jeanne’s first flare kept her bedridden and walking with a cane for nine months. She was working from home per pandemic restrictions, masking how ill she was over Zoom meetings.
“Evgeniy was carrying me from my bedroom to my office to go to work,” Jeanne says. “I was taking showers laying down because I couldn’t hold myself up. My vision collapsed in my right eye.”
Her gait deteriorated and she often became unable to walk. “I was numb on my whole right arm. My right leg was numb,” Jeanne says. “Tremors, probably eight or nine hours a day at that point when I was really sick.”
Fortunately, she emerged from the hell of her first flare. But what was next? She found inspiration from the stories of others.
“I went online and started looking for marathon runners with MS. I wanted to find the healthy people. I wanted to find the people who are doing it anyway. I wanted to know that there’s hope.”
The desire—perhaps need—of a third R2AK run was clear. But if the theme of the first race was an experience and the second was performance, what was this third race about? Human connection with the people who mattered most to her.
“To be able to take the magic of our year one team…and the year two goal of pushing as hard as we freaking could and pushing the boat as hard as we could—we took both of those things, and we plugged it into year three and did all of it.” Her husband, long resistant to doing the R2AK himself, relented. Nikki Henderson eagerly leapt aboard again. And they’d sail beloved Gray Wolf this time. The vibe was more like a family than a crew. Team We Brake for Whales was formed.
Her symptoms were still there; at one point she began to tremor on deck, but her sailing family knew what to do. “They took me down below and got me snugly in a bunk to cool off with ice packs. There I was, in Alaska, wearing ice.” Jeanne recovered and went right back on deck.
Despite her illness, the 2023 race came off as quite zen compared to Jeanne’s two previous runs. For We Brake for Whales, the more relaxed and blissed out the crew, the smoother and faster Gray Wolf sailed. Jeanne describes how the “ego potential” of multiple CEOs and competitive racers aboard could’ve leant itself to conflict. To curb this, Jeanne led ritualized commitment exercises to get everyone on the same page. Consensus was reached. This run was about the celebration of life.
“When was the last time you squealed with glee?” Jeanne asks broadly to humanity. She’s proud to share many R2AK 2023 gleeful moments. There was a whiskey dance party while sitting at anchor waiting for the proper tide change to go through Seymour Narrows. Elf on the shelf made an appearance. Waking each other up to see humpbacks bubble feeding. And laughter. A lot of laughter.
Despite the de-emphasis on pushing racing limits, We Brake for Whales took first place. And yes, they did brake for many whales.
Knowing she put everything on the table, both with tiller and walking cane in hand, gives Jeanne a deep sense of peace.
“Maybe I’m a little more like Gray Wolf. Maybe people are like their sailboats…she’s pretty resilient. She just bends her mast. She’s like, meh.”
She has a feeling that something is next, an inspiration-driven journey that pushes the limits, even if it’s not a physical R2AK-style battle.
“I want people to hope,” she says. “Storytelling is a magical thing. It’s getting back to connection. It’s finding something in a story that you connect to. And we build our own stories and our own lives.”
Jeanne laughs. “This is all intense talk. There’s so much fun to be had. We can’t miss out on the fun of what R2AK represents. You have to keep it light too. You’ve got to have the jokes and the things that break the ice. I always brought what I call the ‘bag of fun’ on the boat, where I plant stupid things to break out at the mundane moments of the sail, because you know you’re going to have those lulls and those boring times.
“You’ve got to appreciate those moments,” she says, and you get the sense that she could be talking about R2AK or life itself. “Otherwise, why the hell do it?”
August/September 2024
