Few sailors have the America’s Cup pedigree of Michigan-born Dawn Riley: Valencia is the 42-year-old’s fourth appearance.

With one victory, in 1992, under her belt, and the distinction of captaining America3, the first all-women’s team, three years later, Ms Riley is this time working as general manager of the French team, Areva Challenge.

Though the team is far from monocultural, Ms Riley acknowledges that working in a strongly French-influenced environment has required her to modify her management approach.

“In the beginning, there were some issues; trying to figure out how to communicate, how to get your point across, without offending,” she says. “I used to come in in the morning and I would have been up, I would have been working out, I would have thought of things and I would generally go: ‘Hey, you, OK! Now this is what we are going to do.’ And that doesn’t go over so well here. So, I have learned the pleasure of saying, ‘Good morning. How are you? Bonjour, ça va?’”

“Being an American,” she continues,“ a minority in this team but leading the team, I had assumed that everything was a melting pot. I assumed that the truth and the right way were somewhere in the middle. One of the breakthroughs for me was when I realised that… there are times when the American way is absolutely the best way and other times when the best way is the French way. Once I wasn’t wasting my time trying to find the middle ground, we got much more action.”

She points to “running meetings” as an example of when an Anglo-American approach is better, with rigidly disciplined discussions, “always working towards a solution” and “eliminating the desire to talk in circles”.

And the French way? “The food obviously is good,” she says, after a pause. “This is the only team I have ever been on where the food hasn’t been an issue. Because it was a high priority, we made sure we had a very good chef. [The food is] healthy, but tastes great.”

Did she find she had to fight particularly hard to establish her authority over the team, given that she was a foreigner and a woman in what can be a macho world?

“In terms of the female side of it, that is something I have dealt with my whole life,” she says. “I kind of know when to say, ‘Stop it, this is bullshit,’ and when to just go, ‘Whatever,’ and keep going. Being an American, being a foreigner was probably the harder one to deal with because I hadn’t dealt with it before, especially at the beginning when I didn’t speak or understand French at all. Not knowing if I should be laughing, smiling or getting pissed off when they were talking about me.”

Has she learnt French now? “Good French, no; kitchen French, yes. Of course we know all the dirty words first, but after that, everybody kind of knows the terms used for sailing.”

Ms Riley recounts the story of how a journalist once designated her the female equivalent of Russell Coutts.“ And I’m saying, ‘No,not really’” she recalls. “There is a big difference. When he was becoming a good sailor, he was given the opportunity to go and race a boat. So his talents and his experience… are in the strict tactical, steering the boat on-the-water type stuff.

“I recognised early on that that wasn’t going to pay the bills, so [I decided that] I’d better get a broad base of support. That does make me – sorry, Russell – better-equipped to run a team than he is. But he is better-equipped to steer a boat than I am.”

She concludes this answer by conjuring up a vision of corporate utopia: “Wouldn’t it be nice if every head of every company knew how to do everything in the company?” The conversation moves on to the subject of parallels between sport and business.

Ms Riley immediately draws an analogy between an America’s Cup team and a start-up company. “It’s a start-up company in an extremely competitive market,” she says. “Usually when you have a start-up, you have a unique idea. Here we all hope our idea is unique but the bottom line is there are 10 or 11 other teams trying to do exactly the same thing.”

She acknowledges there is one respect in which running an America’s Cup team is less tough than business: “We have complete and total focus,” she says. “You know that your big goal is to win races.”

Areva’s budget of some €30m is about half the amount Ms Riley considers necessary to be fully competitive in Valencia. If the competition does prove too stiff and if, in Ms Riley’s words, Areva “decides… they are not going to go back into the America’s Cup”, then another challenge may beckon.

“The next thing that I’m exploring is working for Hillary Clinton to see how I like politics,”she says. With her fluent manner, strength of character and record of achievement in a demanding, sometimes dangerous, sport, you sense she could be a real asset.

David Owen is the FT’s former sport editor