Beat the boys

“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.

After a bout of two-person 29er sailing, Perez graduated to the one person foiling WASZP class in which she scooped the USA national championship title in 2021.As well outperforming her rivals on the water she was involved in the work to optimize the WASZP foil shape and design.

Her success in the WASZP got her noticed by double America’s Cup winner Jimmy Spithill who wasted no time in recruiting her for his United States SailGP team as part of the SailGP organisation’s women’s pathway programme.

Understandably the then 17-year-old Perez jumped at the chance to join the US squad but the international circuit’s age restrictions meant she had to wait until she turned 18 before she could be with the team in person.

That meant an agonising wait of half a year during which time she missed six events around the world before she finally joined the team in Cadiz, Spain at the end of 2021.

“I would be watching it on TV and thinking ‘I really wish I was there’,” she says. “But even though I couldn't be on site I was still connected with the team. I talked to our coach Phillipe [Presti] a lot about the data, so I was able to get familiar with the F50 through that before my first event in Cadiz.”

Perez turned 18 the week before that event and describes sailing on the American F50 catamaran as ‘the best 18th birthday present ever’.

“I mean come on, going 50 knots at a reaching mark, that’s the best thing you could ask for,” she laughs. “That first time sailing the F50 was awesome. You are going faster than you have on any other sailboat in your life and hearing the scream of the foil is and the noise of the winches turning filled me with so much excitement. I really love sailing the F50, it’s so much fun.”

Fun it must be for sure, but Perez acknowledges the huge step she has made shifting from a one-person foiling dinghy to racing an F50 foiling catamaran with five other sailors. But that’s not to say she feels fazed by the experience – the speeds may be orders of magnitude greater than she is used to but Perez says she is happiest when sailing on foils.

“Foiling is something I love doing – on anything, sailboats or surfboards or windsurfers,” she says. “So I kind of had the sensibility of what it’s like to go fast and to have a foil underneath my feet.

“Foiling on a sailboat doesn’t even still feel like sailing as much because you are just going so fast – I really love that about the sport,” Perez observes.

“The boats in SailGP are fantastic – just the best in the world and the most technologically advanced – and to be going this fast is what I want to do. This is the sailing and the type of racing that I need to be in. When I look at the traditional slow moving sailboats I don’t know if I would have continued on in the sport if I had to sail those boats.”

Right now Perez’s role on the US catamaran is as strategist. She carries out her duties squeezed into the helming pod at the very back of the boat behind Spithill.

Head on a swivel, she focuses most of her attention on what is going on around her on the racecourse and feeds information back to the rest of the crew via the wind resistant, noise cancelling headsets every SailGP sailor wears under their crash helmets.

“You are looking at the puffs and you are looking at the boats around you and I also use a data display located on the F50 wing sail to feed back information about time to the boundaries and the time to the start as well.

“You are kind of painting a picture of the racecourse for everyone on board because they are all focusing on their own roles,” she explains. “The crashes that have happened this season have been because everyone is so focused inboard.”

Perez is highly appreciative of the opportunity she has been given to jump directly into the top end of professional sailing via the SailGP women’s pathway programme.

That programme has really developed very fast and we have a huge goal of incorporating females into the top level of the sport,” she says. “It is a really big goal and something will take a lot of effort to accomplish. There are still a lot things that need to be done but I have gotten my foot in the door.”

It is clear that Perez aims to make the most of the chance she has been given and has aspirations well beyond the strategist position. Right now, she says, she is a sponge soaking up vital information from the more experienced males sailors around her. Longer term though she very much plans to move forward on the boat into a more influential role.

“I really want to be doing something that is making a change,” she says, “What I am doing right now is about words – and words can be listened to by everyone involved or they can be tossed in the wind.

“I want to be changing the angles of the foils or steering the boat, because I know that is something that is being done and is making a difference.

That’s her goal, but for now Perez says she is concentrating on learning as much as she can – particularly by ‘watching and hearing the communication amongst the guys on board’.

“Because they have so much experience, when they talk it’s like a different language. The more I can just be around it, the quicker I will fully understand it,” she says. “I have been learning so much from these guys and hopefully as I get more experience on these boats I will have the responsibility of moving on to another position like the wing trimmer – and then hopefully to helm,” she says.

Perez is adamant that there are no excuses for people to say that women can’t be on board ‘because of the way we look’.

“Yes it will be hard to find a woman that’s over 85 kilos and can grind like these guys can,” she says. “But women are perfect for the three positions in the back: it’s technical, it’s mental and I know that I am very smart on the water and a very accurate driver – so women are perfect for the back three positions.”

Image © Gerard Sheridan for Yacht Racing Life

“I drive all the boats that I race and I really want to drive this one; I want the name Perez to be on the side,” she says wistfully as she gazes up at the blue-hulled US F50 sitting in its cradle next to us.

In no way is Perez afraid of shooting for the stars like this when it comes to goal setting.

Her ‘next big thing’, as she describes it, is mastering the high-performance foiling International Moth class – a move she has made based on a strong recommendation from SailGP founder and CEO Russell Coutts.

“Russell said I should do it and I wanted to anyway,” she says.

“So I bought an Exocet about a month ago and for the summer I will be in Italy at Lake Garda training. I will be doing the Europeans, Foiling Week, and the Italian Nationals and then I will be going back and forwards with the SailGP circuit.

“I don’t have a whole group organised to train with, but in the summer in Malcesine there are always Moth sailors there, so I know there will be people to meet and learn from. I know it will be great training there and I know I will learn a lot.

Even by her standards Perez’s goal in the Moth class is an ambitious one: to win the ultra competitive class’s world championship title before she turns 21.

Perez is excited about this new challenge and this new chapter in her sailing career, but readily admits that she has found the Moth a tough boat to learn.

“It has been an uphill battle so far,” she says. “The Moth is a lot more advanced than the WASZP. It is a lot faster. It’s a lot harder to rig. But I am just starting in the class and I know that everyone that does that goes through the same thing – they will all tell you exactly the same thing.”

“I am focusing on the Moth right now because the likes of Tom Slingsby – and pretty much all the guys in SailGP – their individual campaigns are with the Moth,” she explains. “That’s because it is so technologically advanced, it’s really fast, and it’s a foiling boat.”

“With a lot of these guys, in order to really get their respect, you want to be competing on the same level and the same boat as them.

“At the end of the day, I really just want to beat the boys.”