Stephanie Roble has to be fit and flexible to sail. She’s bear crawling under booms, she’s ripping on stubborn lines, she’s hiking her entire 5-foot-3 frame out the rail, using every muscle in her core to keep her 49erFX Dinghy from tipping over and dying in the waves like a fallen paper kite.
But Roble, the star skipper from the pristine waters of Lake Beulah in East Troy, is not a kid anymore. She’s 35, and her peers have for the most part left competitive racing and are working normal 9 to 5s. Her competition now is mostly a fleet of 23- and 24-year-olds who don’t need Biofreeze and recovery massages just yet. That means Roble and her sailing mate, Maggie Shea – also soon to be 35 years old – have to work especially hard in the gym to keep up.
But they are sharp, focused and in peak form. And that’s a big reason why Roble and Shea are headed back to the Olympic Games.
“We are some of the older girls in the fleet, but on the windy days, which are the most physically challenging, we seem to perform pretty well,” Roble said in a phone interview from her home in Miami. “We like to say we’re not doing too bad for a bunch of old dogs.”
Ranked No. 2 in the world, the pair has its eyes on the podium in Marseille, the sailing satellite location for the Paris Summer Games. To get here, it took resilience, determination, talent – and fundraising – like it does for all of these special athletes. But in Roble’s case specifically, it also took experience and the mental strength borne out of it.
Roble is rich in experience
A longtime competitor from the inland lakes of Wisconsin, Roble competed collegiately at Old Dominion, where she led her team to several women’s and coed national championships as a two-time All-American. Roble trained for the 2012 Olympic Games but didn’t qualify. She then raced professionally.
Roble and Shea, from Wilmette, Illinois, have been sailing together in this dinghy class, the 49erFX, for almost a decade. But they met during their high school years in junior sailing regattas. They parted ways for a bit, as Roble focused on professional keelboat sailing, in which she was the 2014 U.S. Rolex yachtswoman of the year and Shea pursued the 2016 Olympics. They reunited in late 2016 to train for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
More: Nickel: From East Troy to the Olympics, this Wisconsin sailor has reached a goal. Now she waits.
They qualified for the first time in their careers – winning the U.S. Olympic Trials in February 2020 – but the pandemic delayed the Olympics for a whole year and made the training more challenging. Still, Roble and Shea prepared for Tokyo.
They did not qualify for the finals by finishing out of the top 10 in 11th after a controversial call in the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2021. According to US Sailing, Roble and Shea had a strong start in a key race but received a career-first yellow flag penalty from the umpires. They were flagged for improperly moving their bodies to propel the boat in the very light conditions. They were three points shy of advancing to the medal race, and at the end of their regatta.
“This result doesn’t represent all that we’ve learned and accomplished,” Shea told US Sailing.
Winning in 2023-24
While Roble and Shea had a shorter, three-year ramp-up period for this year’s Olympics, they used that experience to propel their seasons going forward. First, they qualified Team USA at the world championship in 2023 by finishing in the top 10. Then they qualified themselves at the Olympic trials this spring through the two-event race setup with the world championship in the Canary Islands and Spain. After earning a big lead in the points standings, Roble and Shea were able to sail smart to guarantee their qualification.
Roble and Shea will be one of the 21 spots in their boat class at the Olympic Games. They will be the only American boat in this race class.
Roble credits something called SWOT – an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – a sports psychology training program. She evaluated everything, from her approach to racing and race days and what level of intensity best suited her, to how she wanted to handle her success as well as any mistakes.
“Mindset is a really a critical thing when it comes to racing,” Roble said. “At the Olympics, everyone has very similar skills on the water; it’s about how you execute those skills that will ultimately set you apart and hopefully win a medal with those skills.
“How do you recover from a bad decision or a mistake on the water? How do you put yourself in the right mindset to go racing? You might be feeling really nervous or anxious – how do you calm yourself down from that to get into your ideal arousal state for racing? Sometimes you’re totally tired and burned out. So how do you get into that ideal mindset?
“You need to figure out how to get there with different techniques.”
Roble and Shea enjoyed a great deal of success in the last year while they sharpened their mental edge. Last summer, at the Olympic test event, they took fourth in the small fleet at the Olympic venue in Marseille. Roble and Shea then took fifth at the World Cup in Spain and seventh at the 2023 world championship. They sailed to a bronze at the Pan Am Games last year.
Familiar with racing venue
Their vast experience also means they know the racing venue at Marseille well. They sailed there in the summer of 2022 and spent two months practicing and racing there in the summer of 2023. They were there this spring for five weeks as well. That allowed them to study and chart the varying weather patterns.
“The U.S. sailing team has a meteorologist who is doing a bunch of research on historical data from weather stations in Marseille,” Roble said. “We take notes on what the wind direction is, what the weather patterns were during that time. And we take notes on which race course we sailed on that day and what the compass numbers were for that day, what the trend of the wind was, what the current was doing that day. So we basically we are able to develop a little bit of a playbook.”
It’s a major accomplishment for that young athlete from Lake Beulah. When their daughter was born, Nancy and Dale Roble brought her home from the hospital, and Dale sailed his MC Scow around Lake Beulah with “It’s a Girl!” written on the sail. Roble’s first lessons were at age 5 at the Lake Beulah Yacht Club’s sailing school in the Opti Sailboats. Growing up on the lake, she was always in a boat or a kayak because the water was essentially her front yard.
Sailing is a way of life on Beulah. All summer, white sails fill the lake with children, teenagers and adults practicing, or sailing in regattas. While they look picturesque against the blue sky and puffs of clouds, they can get very competitive.
“There’s a history of good sailors to come out of Wisconsin and the Midwest,” said Roble’s college coach, Mitch Brindley. “Even with the short season, they’re highly motivated.”
Roble has now sailed around the world, and she’s ready to use all of her knowledge and experience for these 2024 Summer Games.
“Our aim as a team is to be very calculated in our approach and objective at how we look at things on the race course,” said Roble. “Not emotional about if something goes really good or something goes really bad. Just trying to keep things pretty steady Eddie.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: East Troy’s Stephanie Roble heading back to Olympics in sailing
