LAUREN WILSON VIES FOR L.A. 2028 AFTER ALL PHOTOS SECOND WIND RACING EXCEPT WHERE NOTED
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n 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, a 41-year-old mother of two who is training for the 2028 L.A. Olympic Games in the ILCA 6 class. Wilson's parents met when they were high school sailors — the sport is in her blood. She grew up sailing on her family's 40-footer, and started at sailing camps when she was 6 years old. While she was dubious at first, her first summer had her hooked. After she graduated from Sabots in Southern California, the ILCA 6 came around at the perfect time. Having raced the ILCA 6 (formerly Laser Radials) throughout high school, the highlight of her career to that point was a secondplace finish at the US Nationals. By the early 2000s, Wilson was one of America's top ILCA 6 sailors and a top contender to represent the US in the Olympics' European Dinghy class. With the ILCA 6 not yet an Olympic Class, US Sailing encouraged the teenager to switch to the European Dinghy class and make a run at the Olympics. Prior to starting her four years at USC, Wilson was with the US Sailing Team in Athens, Greece, ahead of the 2004 Olympics. While there, she realized her late teens might not be the right time for her Olympic campaign. At a team dinner, Wilson and fellow USC sailor Mikey Anderson were discussing their return to school, two weeks into
the term. "We were in Athens and we were going to miss the drop period and couldn't buy our books. And the guys at the table were like, man, I haven't bought books since 1984." Wilson and Mikey looked at each other, realizing that was the year they were born. Their fellow Olympic hopefuls were "old." But for Wilson it was also an "aha" moment. "It's not gymnastics; your career isn't over. In fact, there's an element of smarts and experience that really lends to success in sport and in life. It didn't have to be right now," she continues.
"Sometimes the second wind is stronger than the first." "The added element of seeing a handful of coaches who hadn't made it to college; hadn't quite made it to the podium and were just coaching at that time. That didn't seem like the course that I wanted for myself. So I just decided, OK, I'm going to go do the normal thing. I want to go to a frat party and it'll be home on a weekend. Well, it turned out I was never home sailing with the USC sailing team." By the time Wilson graduated from college, the ILCA 6 was an Olympic class, and she thought about making another run at the games, moving up to the Bay Area from Southern California to train. Life had other plans.
Lauren Wilson (left center) with the US team at Youth Worlds in 2001.
Page 48 • Latitude 38 • May, 2026
Wilson spent her 20s training in the ILCA 6 out of St. Francis Yacht Club, San Francisco, hoping to make another run at the Games. Then she met her husband, naturally, while sailing. The birth of their first child delayed another Olympic attempt. After several miscarriages attempting for a second child, she decided it was a sign to get back onto the water more consistently, even if it wasn't on the Olympic campaign trail. Being a one-kid family, the couple thought they could get a boat and she could go back to racing. "We were about to buy a boat, literally; had negotiated a price. We were ready to write the check. I found out I was pregnant with my second. The cosmos had a different plan for me. It's not the ILCA, it's another baby, and that's amazing, and we're gonna do that." Wilson shelved her thoughts of podiums and embraced the joy of motherhood. The family returned to Southern California, where they remained active sailors. "I drove a TP52 and called tactics for a handful of years and found that the egos on big boats weren't my favorite thing." Wilson switched to a smaller 36.7 and ran a women's team, fitting racing every couple of months around her family's schedule. In 2024, after missing out on skippering a race due to miscommunication with her team of 12 years, Wilson invited a couple of other moms to join the race aboard her Harbor 20. And while it presented as an innocuous, fun way to introduce her friends to sailing, it would prove to be a pivotal moment. The other moms didn't know how to sail, but Wilson could singlehand. The moms spent the race chatting about parenting, and were then surprised to find they had won the race. They were "mind-blown." "They were all like 'how?' I said, 'Well, I'm kind of good at this.' One of the moms turned to me and asked, 'Then why aren't you doing it?'" Several weeks after that race, Wilson acquired an ILCA 6 and launched her aptly named "Second Wind" campaign and raced her first event, with her family watching. "I did kind of get my lunch handed to me by a bunch of kids that weren't even born the last time I had sailed the