Martine Grael has spent her whole life around gold medals and racecourses, but a new Rolex documentary shows just how much doubt, grief and grit sat underneath that success. Titled ‘Taking the Helm’, the short film traces her journey from a reluctant kid trailing behind her Olympic-champion father and brother on Guanabara Bay to becoming the first woman to drive a boat in the Rolex SailGP Championship.
What makes the film worth a sailor’s time isn’t the highlight reel of results, though there are plenty — youth world titles, a 2014 world championship in the 49er with Kahena Kunze, and gold on home water at the Rio Olympics. It’s the honesty about the in-between years. Martine Grael describes finishing dead last as a junior sailor, wanting to sink beneath the water rather than face another poor result, and later structuring her entire identity around simply not being ‘Torben’s daughter’ or ‘Marco’s sister’. Her account of the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race is similarly unvarnished — she talks candidly about breaking her father’s 24-hour distance record aboard Team AkzoNobel, but also about the isolation of weeks confined offshore and a mental health crisis that followed in Japan, one she credits her psychologist and her family roots with helping her work through.
Martine Grael’s Leap Into SailGP
The back half of the documentary turns to her current chapter: stepping into the cockpit for Mubadala Brazil in SailGP, a league she compares to a woman lining up on a Formula One grid. Racing alongside her brother as a teammate, she frames the move less as a victory lap and more as another test of whether she still has something to prove to herself. For readers who follow the league’s fast-growing global calendar — including the new Sydney SailGP Twilight Racing debut — her perspective on adapting to foiling catamarans after a career in dinghies and ocean boats adds useful context to what’s happening on the water this season.
The full film runs just over thirteen minutes and rewards a proper watch rather than a skim; you can find Martine Grael’s documentary here. It’s a rare, unguarded look at what it costs to keep choosing sailing, even when your name is already written into the sport’s record books.
Video courtesy of ROLEX — watch the full video on YouTube.
