The Hard Climb for Charlotte Rose
After a gutting loss in her last Olympic trials, Charlotte Rose pushes on to LA.
Courtesy Sailing Energy
She won the most races of any ILCA 6 competitor at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials. She’s only 25 years old, but with two back-to-back Youth World Champion titles to her name, she’s a respected force in one of the most competitive sailing classes in the world. Her name is Charlotte Rose, and a heartbreaking defeat in the lead-up to the Paris 2024 Olympics tempted her to walk away from sailing—forever.
It’s a feeling most will never experience: a brutal, cold, sterile “no” to everything you’ve worked toward for at least four years, sometimes your whole life. Arriving at the honor of representing one’s country and hopefully standing on a podium requires a fierce core belief in oneself that’s crafted by years of introspection and the encouragement of friends, family and coaches. It’s not a goal made lightly, and the risk of it all washing away with the result of one regatta takes another kind of strength to open oneself up to the possibility.
“To have it slip through [my] fingers is a pain that will sit with me for the rest of my career,” Rose wrote on social media a week after the Olympic Trials concluded.
Now, a year after the Paris Olympics, Rose is back on the international circuit chasing a podium on home soil for the Los Angeles 2028 Games. A lot has transpired since Trials, and reflection is a critical part of her rise from the ashes and planning of a new, stronger campaign.
Looking back on the eight-day marathon regatta in February 2024, Rose acknowledges she did “a lot of things right, but a lot of things wrong.”
US Olympic hopeful Charlotte Rose, powerful and fast in the ILCA 6 in Hyères.
Courtesy Sailing Energy
On the final day, she had an early start on the penultimate race, and one too many mistakes sealed her fate. “Immediately afterward, I went to put my boat away and I just broke down crying in the parking lot,” she says. After finishing fifth at the 2023 ILCA 6 World Championship and qualifying the US for a berth in the ILCA 6 at the Games, then finishing on the podium at the 2024 World Championship (a feat no American has accomplished since 2016), “nothing matters” was the repeated phrase that fell out of Rose’s mouth over and over as cheers rang out for victors Erika Reineke and Ford McCann not far away. She wanted to quit, wanted to walk away from sailing forever, hang up her hiking pants and leave it all behind.
A chorus of “I’m sorry” engulfed her from loved ones on the ground and from texts on her phone, but it was her mentor, Leandro Spina, of America One Racing and US Sailing Team staff and 2008 Olympian Sally Barkow’s confidence that cut through the noise. “We’re going to figure it out,” they assured her. “This is not the end for you.”
Rose recalls Spina and Barkow standing by her side as her world crumbled. “They told me my abilities weren’t defined at Trials,” she says. “That didn’t sink in fully in the moment through the emotions, but now I know they were right.”
The grief from that loss was all-consuming. And even after time and distance to reflect and recall all of the positives of her event, Rose doesn’t claim she should have gone to the Games in place of Reineke. “It was anyone’s game, and this time it was Erika’s. She did a really good job.”
With swollen eyes from the weight of her new reality, Rose stood alongside Reineke and runner-up Christina Sakellaris at Miami YC for awards and to wish her rival well in representing the United States in Marseille.
The country’s focus turned to Reineke, as what naturally happens with each athlete who wins Trials. The Team and the nation rally resources and support around the selected athletes, and runners up are left to grapple with the dreaded “what now?”
It’s not malicious, but it’s painful all the same.
Rose returned to Houston, Texas, and “went numb.” She still had flights booked to Palma de Mallorca, Spain and Hyères, France for the final two regattas of the season, but couldn’t wrap her head around returning to the water. In the month northbetween Trials and Palma, she got sick twice with the flu. “I tried to move on but I couldn’t do anything.”
She was surrounded by love from her parents, boyfriend, and dog, but it was going to take a Herculean effort to get back in the ring.
Then it came time to finish the job. She went to Palma for the annual Trofeo Princesa Sofia and lost 10 pounds. People asked her why she was there. “I’m sailing, I gotta finish the season,” she answered.
Instead of staying in the region for French Olympic Week two weeks later, Rose felt the pull to come home and made a beeline for Houston to reset. Then she trekked back across the Atlantic for Hyères on the Mediterranean just 40 minutes east aof the future Olympic venue. She stayed in a house with Sakellaris and Lilly Myers, and Canadian athlete Clara Gravely, and her spirits improved. Rose even went on to win the entire event, taking home a gold medal just two months after losing Olympic Trials.
“It felt really good,” she says. “It was a strong ending to the season, but I still didn’t know what I was doing.”
Rose willed herself to follow through on the 2023-2024 circuit, then finally had to face the reality that’d been beckoning in the silence of flight delays, quiet rigging mornings, and waiting for wind.
Where to, now?
The answer to her question came while watching the Paris Olympics. August rolled around, she watched the Opening Ceremony, and felt the draw once again. “It ignited something in me,” she says. “I decided I’m going to do it, and this time I’m going to do it right.”
But what does it mean to “do it right?”
“Trials really shook me. When I said ‘nothing matters,’ I knew that wasn’t true. I’m more than my results. And while I still struggle with that today, I know that this time I want to stand on the podium with an accomplished mission of a balanced, fulfilled journey getting to that moment. I want to be the best version of myself when the medal rests around my neck.”
“My coach and I are working on developing an unbreakable process,” Rose says when we talk in August. “No matter what happens, it will not break me, and that’s how I’ll defeat the Olympic Games.”
It’s a dream she’s had since she was nine years old, and it only strengthened as she saw the effect her Olympic pursuit had on her father and on herself in return. “It’s the pinnacle of sport on such a big stage,” she says, “and I know that if I’m the best version of myself chasing this dream, there’s no barrier I can’t overcome.”
Father, Darren Rose, has been her biggest motivator, and she’s found that he’s also inspired to be the best version of himself when he sees Charlotte in relentless pursuit of the same. “I love my family and they support me so much, even though I’m not around very often. I want to show them that growth is always possible and there’s nothing you can’t achieve.”
With a year and a half of distance since a crushing event, Rose sits with a mature perspective. “This is a very cool thing that I get to do, and I have to keep in mind that at the end of the day it’s just a sailboat race. Not many people get to do this, I’m in a very privileged position to pursue this dream, and I’m just immensely grateful for my community that believes in me.”
LA looms, and so do the Trials. But maturity in the Olympic arena is a powerful and uplifting force.
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