When news reached my in-tray that Anya Colley, a thoroughly dominant female Personal Watercraft racer, was to head for Hull to compete against the men in the 300 Class of the P1 AquaX UK Championship, I was impressed. When I learned that all of her existing 14 titles had been won against male racers, I was even more impressed. And after recalling some past PW experiences and musing on how physical the act of riding a powerful PW can be, I was all set to nominate her for a Knighthood.

Anya Colley

But when the PR prattle mentioned ‘Girl Power’, a dose of much needed perspective brought me to my senses. Now plainly, this was a reference to the vague and shabbily resolved parody of feminism invoked by the Spice Girls but whatever it was, it ought to be consigned to the bin (alongside the indefensibly crass and sexist TV Show that is Loose Women) as an offensive irrelevance - because the fact of the matter is that powerboat racing should have nothing to do with gender.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’ve known plenty of female powerboat racers and they’ve all been fierce and dedicated competitors. Some of them (like Anya) have also enjoyed some notable success. But to imply that women have to battle against the odds to overcome the constraints of their gender is ludicrous because in many cases they are artificially assisted by it.

I have raced against an all-female team in a low-budget UK race series who, in radical contrast to their ‘make-do-and-mend’ competitors, enjoyed an onsite engineering team with a full set of spares. And that’s to say nothing of their four-stone weight advantage, their host of sycophantic sponsors or their ready-made excuse for courting publicity.

The world is full of disadvantaged competitors who really do overcome the odds to achieve great things – as we witnessed to thrilling effect in last year’s Olympics and Paralympics. But a girl who fails to win a boat race despite her natural advantage is not it. We should talk about winners, not women - and I’m willing to bet that a serious woman racer would be the first to agree.

Written by: Alex Smith
Alex Smith is a journalist, copywriter and magazine editor with a long history in boating and a happy addiction to the water. He’s worked on boats, lived on boats, bought boats, sold boats and – when he’s not actually on board a boat – he can generally be found in his Folkestone office, tapping away at the computer and gazing out to sea.