Steering My Olympic Course

Steering My Olympic Course celebrates the achievements of women in sailing who have made it to the peak of the sport either as a competitor, race official, international judge or in a technical role.

Mina Stanikic (Serbia)

Mina represented the Serbian national team for the first time in 2006, sailing in Optimist at the Balkan Championship in Karamursel, Turkey. A year later she began occasional training and attending events in Italy with SVBG from Trieste and coach, Dragan Gasic. Dragan’s coaching played a crucial role in boosting her self-confidence on the international stage.

In 2023, she chaired an International Jury and signed an IJ reference for the first time – also the first occasion where a 30-year-old woman chaired an event predominantly comprised of men eligible for the masters age category.

Mina has been selected as an International Official at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Dr Sophia Papamichalopoulos (Cyprus)

Sophia is an International Olympic Committee Young Leader and Olympic alpine skier who competed at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games together with her brother. After graduating from the Paracelsus Medical University of Salzburg she is now a resident doctor at the Department of Visceral Surgery and Transplantation at the University Hospital in Zurich. Alongside her medical career, she tries to remain engaged in sports and the Olympic Movement. In 2018 she was appointed to the World Sailing Medical Commission.

In her work as an IOC Young Leader, Sophia founded “Winds of Change”, a project aiming to create the first bi-communal Cypriot sailing team that will sail around the divided island together.

Khouloud Masry (Egypt)

Khouloud started sailing to follow in her big brother’s footsteps with the aim of becoming a national champion like him – but little did she know that this dream would be a lot bigger and a lot harder than she ever thought. She became the first Egyptian to qualify for the Youth Olympic games in sailing, but later missed out on qualification for Rio 2016 by a very small margin. Afterwards, she joined the World Sailing Emerging Nations Program (ENP) in Durban, South Africa, which led to the Youth World Championship in Auckland, New Zealand.I n 2019, she made history by becoming the first female Egyptian sailor to qualify for the Olympics, competing in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

After the games she graduated with a degree in Engineering and has now broken her own record by becoming the first female Egyptian sailor to qualify for two consecutive Olympic games and to win an African title.