Former National Champion Eyes Olympics At 41

In most sports, athletes reach their peak in their late 20s and mid-30s, and it’s all downhill from there. That’s not the case for US Sailing Olympic hopeful Lauren Wilson, who at 41 and with two children, is vying to make the 2028 L.A. Olympic Games in the ILCA 6 class.

Nearly two decades since she stopped competing at the highest level in the ILCA 6, she has come back with a bang. After her first full season in 19 years, Wilson is the seventh-ranked ILCA 6 sailor in the country. While she still has ground to make up in order to claim the United States’ lone ILCA 6 berth, Wilson’s experience and wisdom can be an advantage for her.

“I’ve raced as a teenager. I’ve raced in my 20s,” Wilson says, via the Second Wind Racing press release. “But racing in my 40s is different. I don’t panic after a bad start. I reset faster. Experience and motherhood [have] become an advantage.”

Wilson first came onto the scene with the US Sailing team as a junior national champion in the early 2000s. Two decades later, she has a full slate of elite regattas to sail this year, highlighted by Palma de Mallorca, Almere, Kiel, and right where the 2028 Games will be sailed in Los Angeles.

“There’s this narrative that elite sport has an expiration date,” Wilson says, in the press release, “but strength, resilience and ambition don’t disappear at 40. If anything, they deepen.… Sometimes the second wind is stronger than the first.”