There's something special about New Zealand's youngest Olympian in Tokyo, teenager Erika Fairweather - both in the water and out.
Erika Fairweather has an astute feel for the water; a gift not all swimmers have.
“You can’t coach ‘feel’,” says Gary Francis, Swimming New Zealand’s Olympic team manager.
He describes the 17-year-old high school student – likely to be New Zealand’s youngest Olympian in Tokyo - as athletically gifted and very level-headed.
“Erika’s a complete thoroughbred, very sensible and very determined,” Francis says. “She has her feet on the ground and she’s in a very supportive environment.”
Fairweather's coach in Dunedin since 2018, Lars Humer, agrees. “You can tell she’s got a very good feel for the water – so we try to do different things to help stimulate that feel.”
Next month, Fairweather will swim at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre as the second youngest New Zealand female swimmer to have qualified for an Olympics, after Rebecca Perrott, who was 15 at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Fairweather is also the first New Zealand high school student to qualify for the Olympics as a world junior champion. But she’s proven she can foot it with the world’s best freestylers - her best 400m time was also the sixth fastest in the world earlier this year.
In December, when she was still 16, Fairweather qualified for Tokyo in the 400m freestyle, by clocking 4m 07.43s, just outside her personal best time. She also narrowly missed the 200m freestyle qualifying time by 0.10s, but will still swim it at Tokyo (along with the 4x200m freestyle relay).
She lowered her 400m time again at another Olympic qualifying meet in April, to 4m 06.54s - at the time, a 2021 top six world ranking, and a time faster than third place at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Humer, a former high-performance coach for British Swimming and Swim Ireland and now New Zealand’s Olympic head coach, says Fairweather is a hard worker and a natural swimmer.
“She’s the best trainer in our squad; she’s got good attention to detail. She naturally sits very high in the water,” he said. “It’s enjoyable to have someone with the ability Erika has.”
For Fairweather, who’s in Year 13 at school, all the 4.30am starts have been worth it (she trains in the same pool triple Olympic medallist Danyon Loader swam in; he was also 17 when he won silver at the 1992 Olympics).
“My friends say, ‘Oh my God, you get up so early’. It’s just what happens - it’s my way of life now,” Fairweather says.
“And I love the competitiveness, there’s nothing I’d change.”
The Kavanagh College head girl has also achieved academically, despite missing weeks off school while competing overseas. She’s received academic blues every year and has passed NCEA Level 2 with an excellence endorsement, and is extremely organised in fitting schoolwork around swimming.
“I make it work,” she says. “Most of it I can do at school so it’s not that hard. I’m pretty lucky that school comes quite naturally to me.”
While she likes the sciences, she’s unsure what she wants to do at university. In any case, she may also make the 2022 Commonwealth Games team, a competition starting in less than a year after the Olympics finish in August.
Fairweather wasn’t always a swimmer, despite learning to swim at the age of 10. She also played football and netball and was a surf lifesaver.
She went to her first national age group swimming championships (NAGS) when she was 13, and won five national titles. One, the 200m freestyle, was in age group record time, which she still holds. The same year she collected four titles at the New Zealand surf lifesaving pool championships.
“I thought, ‘Oh, I can actually do this’,” she says.
The following year, Fairweather was contesting her first big international competitions.
As the youngest competitor, she swam in six events at the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires; the 14-year-old just missing the 200m freestyle final against swimmers more than four years her senior.
At the 2018 Junior Pan Pacific championships in Fiji, she broke New Zealand age group records in most of her events, and made the finals in 200m and 400m freestyle.
Fairweather is also one of the few swimmers worldwide to excel at senior level before doing so at world juniors. In 2019, at just 15, she swam two world championship meets, in Korea and Hungary, within six weeks of each other.
She missed a fair bit of school in the process, but helped qualify the women’s 4x200m relay for the Tokyo Olympics. She was the top relay swimmer.
“It was particularly daunting swimming up against those older girls,” she says. “It was definitely a whole new experience – it was much bigger and more professional, and it was really cool.”
A few weeks after the world senior championships, Fairweather then won the world junior title in the 200m freestyle, clocking 1m 57.96s.
“I didn’t expect that,” she says. “I was just so excited; it was just so cool.”
She was also fourth in the 400m event. Both times were faster than any other Kiwi swimmer under 21.
While Fairweather currently holds 26 age group records, she’s yet to set a New Zealand Open record, thanks to the times set by former world record holder, Lauren Boyle. She has, however, been top two in both freestyle events at Open level since she first attended the New Zealand Opens at 14.
At a local level, Fairweather - whose mother is a scuba diving instructor - surely holds a national record for regional swimming records.
Her name sits next to more than 150 Otago age group and open records. She holds records in every swimming event – long-course (50m pool) and short-course (25m pool) - except breaststroke and the 50m and 100m butterfly.
She will no doubt add to that tally as she hasn’t yet had a chance to set any records as an 18-year-old (she turns 18 on December 31 this year).
At the October 2020 New Zealand Short Course champs, Fairweather, still 16, became the fastest under 21 800m swimmer as well, clocking 8:25.61 seconds. At at age 17, Lauren Boyle’s best was 8:42.18 seconds, and she went on to finish 4th at the 2012 London Olympics, New Zealand’s highest female Olympic swimming placing since 1952.
The early morning training and gym sessions are set to continue for a while yet.
She’s one of seven New Zealand swimmers who will make their Olympic debut in Tokyo.
“The feeling of making my first Olympic team is still so surreal. I've worked so hard for this moment, and it is all coming together – it’s so exciting!" Fairweather said as her place in the team was announced at her school assembly, by White Fern and 2008 basketball Olympian Suzie Bates.
"Representing New Zealand and wearing the fern at the Olympic Games is a dream I've had for as long as I can remember, so words don't really do this feeling justice.”
