For her part, Pulido does her best, knowing it takes all of us to make a difference. Making sure to use her platform to speak out for World Environment Day 2025, which is calling for collective action to tackle plastic pollution, is one thing she is doing, with the simple solution of picking up rubbish when she sees it, another.

“If I crash on the water with plastic, my rule is always to stop and pick it up,” she said. “Even sometimes, when I’m competing as well – not in the race, obviously – but if I’m just warming up and I crash, like in Türkiye, many times I crash with the plastic, pick it up, give it to my coach or even tuck it in my wetsuit. If it’s there and I find it, I’m gonna get it out for sure.”

Even in her own sailing community, Pulido acknowledges they could be doing more.

“Not all of us have the same consciousness, even as athletes,” she says. “I pick up trash every day from the beach because some other athletes leave the water bottles on the beach… and I’m like. ‘Guys, you’re complaining about having plastic on the water and then you leave it all in the beach’.

“Like even us sometimes we are not conscious.”

Stopping using plastics at the source is also key in us all tackling the issue, says Pulido.

“I try to be more sustainable,” says Pulido. “It’s hard sometimes because I travel a lot. When I’m in Tarifa, I try to buy super sustainable and buy the veggies around the area, buy the fish that we fish here, it is very nicely fished, not so bad in [terms of] destroying the environment. I try to be as conscious as I can.

“(But) us as humans, we are very selfish, right? We always want more and more money and more wealth. And there are just some people, they just don’t care.

“And at the end, why do you want so much if we’re gonna destroy our planet?

“Where are we gonna live?”

For more information on World Environment Day 2025, including how we all can adopt sustainable practices that drive systemic change, see here.