As the New Zealand team close in on the lead in SailGP, sailor Liv Mackay details the challenges the team face and the progress women's professional sailing has made over the past year.
While most of Aotearoa is starting to wind down towards the holiday season, my summer with the New Zealand SailGP team is about to really ramp up.
I’m excited to be racing in all of the final four events of the SailGP 2022-23 season, making it a full-on schedule. There’s an event every four weeks - dashing from Singapore to Sydney, then to Lyttelton in March, where our team can’t wait to finally race these incredible F50 boats on our home waters. Then there's the grand final in San Francisco.
Just over halfway through the season, we’re sitting in second overall, behind the Australians. As a team, we’ve had a really good string of events with wins in Plymouth and Copenhagen, and a second in St Tropez. The last two events have been more challenging.
The level of competition is now getting seriously high. Any of the nine teams have a chance of making the final at each event now. That makes SailGP great to watch – and intense to race.
So right now, we’re all in Auckland and doing testing – and that means grinding tests with the whole team.
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One of the real challenges the entire SailGP team faces is our wellbeing – the amount of travelling we do plays havoc on our fitness and our health.
It’s an interesting time for me, because grinding has never been a part of my sailing repertoire. But on these boats, the female athlete becomes a grinder in light winds – and the Singapore event looks like it’s going to be in quite light airs, which means there’s a high chance I’ll be needed on the handles.
So over the next six weeks, we’re going to pay massive attention to that fitness.
It means it will be a pretty quiet festive season for me, but I intend to make sure it’s still good fun. A lot of my friends are really into sport, and I’m getting them involved in my training.
We’ll do some ocean swimming and trail running together. And I’m really trying to get into wind foiling and wing foiling, and attempt to surf.
It’s not often all of the New Zealand SailGP crew are back home at the same time, so we have quite a few meetings over the next two weeks. It’s a good feeling after spending so much of this year sailing overseas; I feel very grounded.
The season has been awesome so far. I’m loving the racing and excited about how the league is growing and the influence it’s having on sailing.
SailGP’s Cadiz Grand Prix in September marked one year since women started racing on the F50 and media coverage reflected how significant this milestone was. It feels to me that women are gaining a platform and starting to voice where we think things should go in professional women’s sailing.
However, progress still feels slow. As sailors we’re hungry for every opportunity possible to sail, so inevitably there’s a desire for things to move faster.
The true development of the programme will be how the next generation of women are brought into the league. I believe SailGP is at a crucial point with its Women’s Pathway and it will be interesting to see what develops in the next few years.
My hope is for more support for the Women’s Pathway programme, investing in training time on the F50 boats for women. That would really set us up to be fairly selected to compete at the highest level.
SailGP is truly a game-changer for the viewership of sailing and it’s incredibly exciting to be having a home event here in New Zealand in March. We’ve been talking about what the event in Christchurch will look like, and we’re fully aware there will be challenges with all the media, noise and other distractions.
My sailing schedule this year has been pretty full-on (which I’ve been loving) with the final ETF26 Grand Prix of the season wrapping up in October - finishing the first season of campaigning for Live Ocean Racing. The launch of Live Ocean Racing meant a lot, both to the sailors and the wider team, and it’s been an exciting journey so far.
This year we were one of three new teams in the high performance foiling cat series, and for us, it was all about learning. Our all-female crew are naturally competitive and together we push to get the most out of each other. Our goals this season were to understand the boat, how we best work together and how we can perform going into next year.
The three events we sailed with a core team - of Alex Maloney, Jo Aleh, Molly Meech, Erica Dawson and coach Jason Saunders - were epic. Each one built on the last. And at event three we two younger sailors, Serena Woodall and Helena Sanderson, join us. They’re both awesome sailors, and I love that Live Ocean Racing is able to give such an epic experience to some of our young women. It’s definitely something we want to keep doing.
We finished our last event in the ETF26 Grand Prix feeling we’d come together strongly as a team. I'm really looking forward to what's ahead, especially with the changing culture of women's sport globally.
The pinnacle of women’s sailing has mostly been in Olympic class racing, but it involves sailing by yourself or with just one other person in the double-handed classes. The ETF26 provides the opportunity to race with four women on the boat. It’s taught us all a lot in terms of communication and how we best work together.
It’s been brilliant to see the class shift from having one female competitor to almost 50:50 men and women.
The learning crossover between the ETF26 and SailGP is massive, which is why the ETF26 circuit is perfect as a training and racing platform. To excel in SailGP, it requires more than technical understanding of the boat and technique, but also how you can work together as a team under pressure in a dynamic environment.
On the ETF26, you can practice these three aspects on a smaller scale. The style of racing, with reaching starts and windward leewards in both circuits, make it a great crossover and there’s likely to be at least nine boats on the ETF26 start line in 2023.
It's been both a fun and challenging experience to skipper the Live Ocean Racing ETF26 team. It comes with a lot of responsibility, and I feel very fortunate to have the support of some incredible people backing me in this role.
I've grown a lot both on and off the water and developing my communication skills has been a big area of personal growth in both SailGP and Live Ocean Racing.
Live Ocean Racing’s purpose is something I’ve thought about a lot throughout the year. I’m at the beginning of my journey learning about the ocean and trying to use my voice for good. I’ve sailed since I was young, so I have a strong natural connection to the ocean, but I have learning to do to deepen my understanding of the threats it currently faces.
Most New Zealanders have a connection to, and passion for the ocean, but not everyone knows that it’s at a tipping point and facing urgent threats. Growing my understanding, and sharing my journey, I hope I can inspire and educate others so that we can work towards a better future for the ocean and our planet.
I love sport and the way it can make people very passionate. Championing action for a healthy ocean is important to every member of the team.
By using the power of sport and our platform we can shine a spotlight on the significant issues the ocean is facing, hopefully igniting conversations and action. Having the vision for a healthy ocean at our core brings a sense of higher purpose that we all care deeply about.
We race on the ocean, for the ocean. It unites us and makes us stronger.
