“I don’t come from a sailing family like many of the top sailors do,” Perez explains. “My mum and dad aren’t sailors and my sister and brother don’t know much about it either – so I wasn’t introduced to it because of them.”
That’s not to say she was completely impervious to the delights of sailing back then. She remembers being surrounded by sailboats as she grew up and thinking they were really cool – but other sports were vying for her time and attention too.
“I was trying lots of other sports but none of them really stood out to me,” she recalls. “Then I tried sailing and I really loved it.”
Her first sail was in a small one person O’pen Bic, a class in which she rocketed to success, becoming in 2018 the first female sailor to win the North American Championship – a feat which she followed up by winning back-to-back world championship titles the following year.
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