As NZ win their first SailGP event in Plymouth, Kristy Havill goes behind the scenes of the team and the global regatta, and sees where Olympic champion Jo Aleh and other female sailors make a difference.
The fastest growing professional sports league in the world? Check. The most environmentally friendly and sustainable sporting event on the planet? Check. High octane sailing? Check. Women on board every boat? You guessed it – check.
The high-performance foiling 50 foot catamarans that race in SailGP, at some of the most iconic locations around the globe, are an absolute thing of beauty, which require equal parts skill, courage and fitness to wrangle.
Up until season two of the SailGP league, started by Kiwi Sir Russell Coutts, female sailors had no opportunities to sail foiling catamaran boats of this size.
That all changed with the launch of the SailGP women’s pathway programme. Now, female athletes are racing alongside and against the best of their male counterparts in a bid to close the gaping gulf of experience between genders in sailing bigger and faster boats.
Sail GP races are short and sharp - only 13 minutes long - and with nine F50s flying around the course at speeds hitting 50 knots, it can make for some chaotic and congested racing.
That's where the communication skills and extra pair of eyes each female sailor brings to the boat are crucial, evidenced during the Great Britain Sail Grand Prix, on Plymouth Sound, where the wind direction and speed was constantly shifting.
This prompted all three boats in day two's final, including New Zealand, to come off their foils and become sitting ducks in the water; their crews frantically working together to be the first boat to find the next puff of wind and get back up foiling again.
In her first SailGP event, Olympic gold medallist Jo Aleh was constantly turning her head from side-to-side, searching for the next gusts, then looking back behind her evaluating the progress of opponents Denmark and Australia.
From her vantage point on the boat, she could see things helmsman Peter Burling couldn't see, and it proved to be a valuable contribution to the team’s performance - as New Zealand clinched their first Sail GP title and gathered valuable points towards securing a place in the end-of-season championship race.
Ever the straight shooter and as humble as they come, Aleh downplayed her contribution to the team’s success.
“The boys have done a lot of hard work behind the scenes,” Aleh, 36, shared. “It’s cool seeing us put it all together and execute when it mattered. The racing was the same tempo as training, so when you’re doing that you know you’re doing it well.”
But there's no doubt the women on board these flying F50s are making a difference.
Initially each of the eight countries competing in season two held training camps for their nation’s top female sailors before selecting a couple to come into the fold and immerse themselves in off-water roles with their respective teams at each Grand Prix.
The New Zealand SailGP Team, co-skippered by Burling and Blair Tuke, took on experienced Nacra17 sailors Liv Mackay and Erica Dawson. Mackay recently shared her insights on her role with LockerRoom.
An argument could be made that there was an element of box ticking going on, having women so close to the action yet so far - especially since women didn’t feature in the first season in 2019.
At the recent leg in Plymouth, I asked Sail GP’s inclusion programme manager Lindsay Molyneux if that was the case. She reinforced it wasn’t, and that organisers are taking the time to get things right.
“We’re really building, and we’re only at the start of our journey,” Molyneux says. “We’re navigating through it, putting feelers out, speaking to the teams and make sure they’re buying into it and believing in what we’re doing.”
It’s a sensible approach to take. Forcing the female athletes off the deep end, without a suitable level of training on boats they could previously only have dreamt of sailing, would be not only unfair, but unsustainable for the success of the programme.
The wait was worth it. Organisers announced before the Spain Grand Prix in Cadiz last October the racing configuration of each boat would increase from five members to six, and the sixth must be a female.
The first job for each team was figuring out how best to utilise the skillset of their female athlete and sixth sailor onboard. Every team has settled on a ‘helm assist’ role, where the female sailor is situated in the cockpit right behind the helmsman, or driver as they like to call it in Sail GP.
What it all looks like in practise differs slightly from team to team, and the New Zealand team have decided that on top of their communication about strategy and tactics the helm assist role will cross the boat first with Tuke to then steer the boat out of manoeuvres until the rest of the cavalry arrives.
The New Zealand team welcomed a third female into their midst in Plymouth, with Aleh, renowned as one of the best sailors in the world. Aleh is now sailing an 49erFX with Molly Meech trying to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics. And she made no bones about what she experienced out on the big cats.
“It was pretty hectic, eh!” Aleh exclaimed.
“It was good fun, and cool to see how we reacted when we fell back a wee bit and kept really calm and composed and held it together – it was impressive to see.”
An Olympic gold and silver medallist, as well a double world champion, Aleh was a valuable addition to the team and one that co-CEOs, Burling and Tuke, were excited about.
“We’ve known Jo for a very long time, and she’s fitted in really well to the group,” Burling says.
“All three women [Aleh, Mackay and Dawson] have done great work and helped us grow, and that’s an amazing part of the NZ SailGP team - that depth of female talent.”
It's not just communication and strategy the female sailors are bringing to the team, while improving their skills.
Before this current step in the women’s pathway programme was implemented, the configuration of a boat’s crew would drop from five members to three to sail effectively in lighter winds.
Now, crew member numbers drop from six to four, with the female sailor remaining on the boat and taking up grinding duties – and with that comes an opportunity to demonstrate their strength and physicality.
And with the rockstars of world sailing occupying the driver seats, there’s arguably no better people to be learning from than the likes of Burling, Australian Tom Slingsby, Brit Sir Ben Ainslie and another of our favourite Aussies – Jimmy Spithill.
Enhancing the skills and experience of these female sailors across all facets of racing bigger foiling boats is something Sail GP teams are taking very seriously. And a couple of countries in particular are doing everything they can to enable their counterparts – with the Kiwi team leading the charge.
Burling and Tuke have gone one step further and established a racing team bearing the name of their foundation, Live Ocean.
Live Ocean Racing entered an all-female team in the 2022 edition of ETF26 racing, a five-event series using 26-foot foiling catamarans. It’s skippered by Mackay with Aleh, Dawson, and Olympic silver medallists Meech and Alex Maloney - with various up-and-coming Kiwi female sailors joining the crew depending on the sailors’ schedules.
The significance of this? They’re the only team with an all-female crew.
“It’s something that Blair and I are really proud of,” Burling says. “To be able to invest back in them through Live Ocean Racing and help grow more pathways for women.”
To have their male counterparts helping them to close the gap to achieve the long-term goal of parity of opportunities is a special sight to see.
Love him or hate him from his chequered history of taunting the Kiwis during the America’s Cup, Spithill is one of the greatest sailors of his generation and is another driver making huge contributions to achieving the goals of the overall inclusion and diversity strategy.
His young charge onboard the USA boat is 18-year-old CJ Perez, the youngest sailor in SailGP and also the first Latina to compete. She cannot speak highly enough of Spithill and how he’s empowering her to achieve her goals.
“I want to be at the helm of one of these boats one day,” Perez says. “He’s been giving me quite a bit of time on the wheel. In training [in Plymouth] he actually got off the boat and gave me the keys to it. He wasn’t even on it, and I did my first jibe without him behind me.
“It was so nice feeling all the responsibility that he normally feels, and being one step closer to being able to do this in a race myself.”
But where does it all lead to? What does the future look like long term for women’s sailing on foiling boats?
I soon find out it's not a question with a unanimous answer.
All the female sailors are united in their response: There’s a long way to go to being on the same level as the men, but they’re relishing the opportunities placed in front of them in the short term.
Ideas such as a women’s SailGP, or a 50:50 ratio of women to men on the SailGP boats are bandied about.
Ultimately, though, what everyone wants to achieve is symbolic of what society is trying to achieve - not just in sport. That equity and equality is achieved the world over, so these conversations and focus become unnecessary.
As Molyneux puts it: “If I can make myself redundant, that would be great.”
* SailGP will finally come to New Zealand next March, racing on Whakaraupō Lyttelton Harbour, and will alternate between there and Auckland for the next four years. The next event in Season 3 is in Denmark next week.
