Culture
At the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Iron Dames bring the power of pink
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What do you want to be when you grow up?
An astronaut chef. A jet pilot. A dancer. A racing driver.
Children’s imaginations run wild, and these dreams can sometimes seem like a distant future, an intangible concept difficult to grasp. But perhaps seeing their dreams featured on one of the most eye-catching liveries in all of international motorsports this year will help these aspirations feel more like reality. Because as the Iron Dames’ 2024 Le Mans project says, “Every Dream Matters.”
Ahead of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first all-women lineup in endurance racing asked fans on social media “what did you dream of becoming when you were a child.” They later visited an elementary school in Le Mans, France, asking them to draw how they imagined their future, and explained the story of how the Iron Dames are “Women Driven by Dreams.” With the help of AI, the drawings were converted into a livery that symbolizes what the Iron Dames stand for.
Iron Dames founder Deborah Mayer (in black) with Rahel Frey, Sarah Bovy and Michelle Gatting. (Courtesy of Iron Dames)
“We want to tell the kids that no matter what you are dreaming of becoming, everything in life is possible,” said Michelle Gatting, one of the three women who will pilot the Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo2. “As long as you have a dream, a vision in your head of something you want to achieve, it’s already a big thing.”
Who are the ‘Iron Dames’?
Six years ago, former racing driver Deborah Mayer founded the Iron Dames to show that women can be involved in motorsports in any capacity. As Gatting said, “to prove that women can compete on the same level as men in motorsports.”
It’s about empowering women and easing the barriers to entry women face in the male-dominated world of motorsports, promoting inclusivity and investing in helping develop young talent. But it’s also about being competitive and winning, a project to last for years to come rather than a flash-in-the-pan type moment.
Gatting was one of the first Iron Dames, joining in 2019 before it even had a name.
“The project was basically not born yet,” she said. “It was already in the mind of Deborah, that she had a vision about during the project.” Gatting received an email about testing the car, which was a Ferrari at the time. It’s the kind of offer you don’t say no to.
Gatting’s motorsports journey began as a coincidence. The Dane was on a vacation with her family in the south of France when she hopped into a go kart at seven years old. She went from not knowing much about motorsports to making it her life. “When I was very young, I only dreamed about becoming a Formula One driver, and I was probably a bit more naive,” Gatting said. Over time, she saw that it was more than just F1. “I changed my vision, and for me, it was (that) I wanted to become an endurance driver.
“I wanted to race the 24 Hours of Le Mans.”
The Iron Dames’ Lamborghini Huracan got a special design for the 2024 24 Hours of Le Mans. (Courtesy Iron Dames)
Endurance racing is fairly different from the typical racing category, like F1 or IndyCar. Rather than driving over a set distance, endurance racing involves driving as far as possible within a preset time limit. With how strenuous endurance racing is, the World Endurance Championship (WEC) allows teams to split the race into stints, rotating drivers through the cockpit.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the premier race of WEC. Part of the triple crown of motorsports, it’s an 8.5-mile (13.6 km) track where 62 cars and 184 drivers across multiple classes drive for 24 hours.
The Iron Dames gave Gatting that chance in 2019, and now, she’s preparing for her sixth 24 Hours of Le Mans. “The project has changed my life, my career, I always wanted to become professional and make a living out of it. But it’s a very few drivers in the world who get that opportunity.” But making it to the top of endurance racing was no easy feat. Gatting sacrificed her teenage years — and doesn’t regret it — but also endured financial troubles. At one point, she had to sit out a season due to having “no money” and “basically, year after year, begging people and sponsors for money to go racing.”
Every dream matters.💗
We have transformed your childhood dreams into a reality that will race with us at the @24hoursoflemans for Round 4 in @FIAWEC.
Every dream matters, and we’re here to prove it. They will be our lucky charms and will symbolise our commitment to nurture… pic.twitter.com/gPSc57Aqnz
— Iron Dames (@IronDames_) June 3, 2024
The other two members of the 2024 Le Mans driver lineup are Sarah Bovy and Rahel Frey, who replaced an injured Doriane Pin.
Frey is another OG member of the Iron Dames, along with Manuela Gostner. Brothers Giacomo and Andrea Piccini, the latter of whom is the team principal for the Iron Lynx (the service provider for the Iron Dames), reached out to Frey given her experience level. She started go karting in 1998 and moved to single seaters several years later — and won a German Formula Three race in 2007.
“They asked me to be part of the project because they were looking for a female racer who already has good experience for endurance racing, who can basically join and guide, lead, a female driver crew,” Frey said.
It was through Gatting and Frey that Bovy, the third member of the Iron Dames’ 24 Hours of Le Mans driver lineup for this year, learned about the project. The Belgian driver heard of the two women and saw the creation of the project via social media.
“At the time, I thought, ‘Oh, another great project that I’m never going to be part of,’” Bovy said. “I would say that my first impression was really like, ‘Oh, I wish I could do that, but it’s too late.’”
Still, Bovy, who got her start at racing through karting at a fair, followed them on Facebook and Instagram. She continued with her career, racing in the 24 Hours of Spa and the maiden season of the all-women W Series in 2019. But in 2021, she saw the team may be short a driver, and she sent them an email to see if she could fill in. Spoiler: the answer was yes.
Making childhood dreams a reality. 💭
As the Iron Dames prepare to tackle the @24hoursoflemans, we encourage all of you to dream big. One day the young girls of today will be lining up to race at this iconic location – and it could be you. https://t.co/o21ZEFaRjL#WEC… pic.twitter.com/I9qckS1cVV
— Iron Dames (@IronDames_) June 5, 2024
“It’s important to underline that nothing ever came easy. I think for all the Iron Dames, we worked our, sorry to say, ass off to reach this level,” Gatting said. “And I’m just extremely happy that what we’re doing with this project now, we are making it, let’s say not easier, but we are giving young girls an opportunity to join such a project (at) a very early age. If I had that opportunity when I was eight years old, I don’t want to think about where it could have taken me.
“But we are changing the world of motorsport with this project.”
‘Women Driven by Dreams’
You can’t miss the Iron Dames when they’re on track.
No, it’s not because of they’re women. It’s because of the car’s color. Bovy said originally it started as a black or dark blue base with some pink detailing. “When we started getting some stronger results, when we felt we were ready to expose ourselves a little bit more to the industry, our media team came back to us and say like, ‘Listen, girls, next year, we are inverting the color. The car is going to be pink with black details.’”
But it wasn’t just the bright pink car. It was the race suits and shoes, the team fully embracing what has long been considered a feminine color.
“The point is to say that pink is not a stupid color. Pink is not your weak color,” Bovy said. “Pink is the color we grew up with. We are kids from the 90s, and in the 90s, pretty much everything for girls was pink. So why would we need to hate it or say that it’s a weak color? We just don’t agree with that. We say if you like pink, pink can be a very powerful color.”
Ahead of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Iron Dames visited an elementary school in Le Mans, France, asking students to draw how they imagined their future. (Courtesy Iron Dames)
If someone asked her to race with pink on her suit before she joined the Iron Dames, Gatting would quickly decline. “I don’t want to show people that I am a woman driving,” she says. But now? “I wear it with pride,” she said, later showing the hot pink nail polish on her fingernails.
But the pink does bring an element of pressure. It is a vibrant pink, one that can’t simply blend in with the pack. Bovy said, “We all looked (at) each other, and we were like, ‘Wow, okay, we need to win races with this car because otherwise we’re going to look ridiculous.’”
In 2022, the Iron Dames finished third with 93 points in WEC, competing in the top class of GT racing, the LMGTE Am. The following season, they took another step forward and finished second with 118 points. Both seasons, the Iron Dames also competed in 24 Hours of Le Mans with the same lineup as this year, finishing seventh in 2022 and fourth in 2023.
As time went on and they continued moving up the ladder, the women grew more comfortable with the car’s color, Bovy equating it to “representing your flags or your country.” It’s a source of pride. After all, they’ve won in the pink and in other colors, as Bovy pointed out. Most recently, they’re race winners in the WEC, making history in the series as the all-women crew that won the LMGTE Am season finale in Bahrain last year.
“We don’t really feel that the color is just defining us anymore,” Bovy said. “We just wanted to give more visibility to the project.”
And it is becoming more visible. Lines form for autograph sessions at the track, and the women are noticing how their merchandise is becoming more prevalent in the paddock, especially among male fans.
“They really just support us and they support the fact that the project, it’s really something to be taken serious,” Gatting said. “But also, people respect us for everything we have done and everything we do. Every time we race, we want to prove that we are not just here to drive around and be a part of the competition.
“We are here for one thing, and that is to win.”
Talking about the impact gives Gatting goosebumps and makes her emotional because of what they’ve achieved over the last several years and how they’ve grown. “We are top professional racing drivers. And we are competing with the best male drivers in the world. And people, they don’t look at us in this strange way anymore.”
And it all started with the determination to chase a dream from their childhoods. After all, that’s who the Iron Dames are — “women driven by dreams.” The Iron Dames are bigger than just these three women. While the project is heavily invested in motorsports with other drivers like Doriane Pin and Marta García, the Iron Dames are also involved in equestrian. The entire project, including those in background roles like marketing, now amount to 45 people.
This weekend, Gatting, Frey and Bovy will all strap in for one of motorsports’ biggest moments of the year, bringing children’s dreams to life on-track with the livery while simultaneously living out their own aspirations.
“What started with the idea of promoting women’s motorsport and trying to have more of us in there is basically now something much bigger than that,” Bovy said. “(It) is empowering women all across the world to stand up and to fight for what kind of dream they want to reach.”
(Lead image: Photos courtesy of Iron Dames; Design: Dan Goldfarb/The Athletic)
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment celebrates lines from popular crime novels. (As a hint, the correct books are all “firsts” in one category or another.) In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the novels if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Xia De-hong, who survived persecution and torture as an official in Mao Zedong’s China and was later the central figure in her daughter’s best-selling 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” died on April 15 in Chengdu, China. She was 94.
Ms. Xia’s death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Jung Chang.
Ms. Chang’s memoir, which was banned in China, was a groundbreaking, intimate account of the country’s turbulent 20th century and the iron grip of Mao’s Communist Party, told through the lives of three generations of women: herself, her mother and her grandmother. An epic of imprisonment, suffering and family loyalty, it sold over 15 million copies in 40 languages.
The story of Ms. Chang’s stoic mother holding the family together while battling on behalf of her husband, a functionary who was tortured and imprisoned during Mao’s regime, was the focus of “Wild Swans,” which emerged out of hours of recordings that Ms. Chang made when Ms. Xia visited her in London in 1988.
Ms. Xia was inspired as a teenager to become an ardent Communist revolutionary because of the mistreatment of women in the Republic of China, as well as the corruption of the Kuomintang nationalists in power. (Her own mother had been forced into concubinage at 15 by a powerful warlord.)
In 1947, in Ms. Xia’s home city of Jinzhou, the Communists were waging guerrilla war against the government. She joined the struggle by distributing pamphlets for Mao, rolling them up inside green peppers after they had been smuggled into the city in bundles of sorghum stalks.
Captured by the Kuomintang, she was forced to listen to “the screams of people being tortured in the rooms nearby,” her daughter later wrote. But that only stiffened her resolve.
She married Chang Shou-yu, an up-and-coming Communist civil servant and acolyte of Mao, in 1949.
It was then that disillusionment began to set in, according to her daughter. The newlyweds were ordered to travel a thousand miles to Sichuan, her husband’s home province. Because of Mr. Chang’s rank, he was allowed to ride in a jeep, but she had to walk, even though she was pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage as a result.
“She was vomiting all the time,” her daughter wrote. “Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car.”
That was the first of many times that her husband would insist she bow to the rigid dictates of the party, despite the immense suffering it caused.
When she was a party official in the mid-1950s, Ms. Xia was investigated for her “bourgeois” background and imprisoned for months. She received little support from Mr. Chang.
“As my mother was leaving for detention,” Ms. Chang wrote, “my father advised her: ‘Be completely honest with the party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict.’ A wave of aversion swept over her.”
Upon her release in 1957, she told her husband, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband.” Mr. Chang could only nod in agreement.
He became one of the top officials in Sichuan, entitled to a life of privilege. But by the late 1960s, he had become outraged by the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s blood-soaked purge, and was determined to register a formal complaint.
Ms. Xia was in despair; she knew what became of families who spoke out. “Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?” she asked.
Mr. Chang’s career was over, and both he and his wife were subjected to physical abuse and imprisoned. Ms. Xia’s position was lower profile; she was in charge of resolving personal problems, such as housing, transfers and pensions, for people in her district. But that did not save her from brutal treatment.
Ms. Xia was made to kneel on broken glass; paraded through the streets of Chengdu wearing a dunce’s cap and a heavy placard with her name crossed out; and forced to bow to jeering crowds.
Still, she resisted pressure from the party to denounce her husband. And unlike many other women in her position, she refused to divorce him.
Twice she journeyed to Beijing to seek his release, the second time securing a meeting with the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was considered a moderate. Ms. Xia was “one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking,” her daughter wrote in “Wild Swans.”
But Ms. Xia and her husband never criticized the Cultural Revolution in front of their children, checked by the party’s absolute power and the fear it inspired.
“My parents never said anything to me or my siblings,” Ms. Chang wrote. “The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.”
She was held at Xichiang prison camp from 1969 to 1971 as a “class enemy,” made to do heavy labor and endure denunciation meetings.
The camp, though less harsh than her husband’s, was a bitter experience. “She reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion,” her daughter wrote. “She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unbearable.”
Xia De-hong was born on May 4, 1931, in Yixian, the daughter of Yang Yu-fang and Gen. Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the metropolitan police in the nationalist government.
When she was an infant, her mother fled the house of the general, who was dying, and returned to her parents, eventually marrying a rich Manchurian doctor, Xia Rui-tang.
Ms. Xia grew up in Jinzhou, Manchuria, where she attended school before joining the Communist underground.
In the 1950s, when she began to have doubts about the Communist Party, she considered abandoning it and pursuing her dream of studying medicine, her daughter said. But the idea terrified her husband, Ms. Chang said in an interview, because it would have meant disavowing the Communists.
By the late 1950s, during the Mao-induced Great Famine that killed tens of millions, both of her parents had become “totally disillusioned,” Ms. Chang said, and “could no longer find excuses to forgive their party.”
Mr. Chang died in 1975, broken by years of imprisonment and ill treatment. Ms. Xia retired from her government service, as deputy head of the People’s Congress of the Eastern District of Chengdu, in 1983.
Besides Ms. Chang, Ms. Xia is survived by another daughter, Xiao-hong Chang; three sons, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei and Xiao-fang; and two grandchildren.
Jung Chang saw her mother for the last time in 2018. Ms. Chang’s criticism of the regime, in her memoir and a subsequent biography, made returning to China unthinkable. She told the BBC in a recent interview that she never knew whether her mother had read “Wild Swans.”
But the advice her mother gave her and her brother Xiao-hei, a journalist who also lives in London, was firm: “She only wanted us to write truthfully, and accurately.”
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
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