Suzanne McFadden for LockerRoom
It’s the 38th-birthday present Jo Aleh never expected to receive.
Last Monday, Aleh and her sailing partner, Molly Meech, flew home to Auckland from Marseille, where they’d been training for their Paris Olympics campaign in the 49erFX.
Within a couple of hours of touching down, they were out on the Hauraki Gulf, getting acquainted with Emirates Team New Zealand’s AC40 for the first time. They stayed on the water well after it turned dark.
On the bleak autumn day she turned 38 last week, Aleh found a dry spot to chat beneath Taihoro, the new AC75 foiling monohull, in Team NZ’s shed.
She laughed at the full-circle moment from 29 years ago when the kid from Muriwai first fell in love with sailing as she watched on TV as Team NZ held the America’s Cup aloft in San Diego.
“It was this team,” she said of those 1995 cup heroes. “So to be wearing the T-shirt and to be actually in this team, sailing the boat and being part of the learning environment, it’s so awesome.”
The past week was no “Give the Girls a Go” sailing programme. Team NZ have made it clear they want Aleh and the rest of their women’s crew to win the inaugural Women’s America’s Cup in Barcelona this year.
“They’ve brought us into the team, they want us to do well, and they’re giving us all the opportunities to really push it. We’re all one team, and I’m really grateful for that,” she says.
Aleh has always been at the forefront of female yachting in New Zealand. She made history in 2002 as the first girl to win the P Class Tanner Cup since the regatta began in 1945, then went on to win Olympic gold and silver, with Polly Powrie, in the 470 dinghy.
But she’s always seen herself as “a little too far ahead of the curve”.
“It’s always felt like I’ve been a little too early with everything in women’s sailing. It’s 12 years since I won gold in London, and the opportunity to move into something else after an Olympics just didn’t exist back then,” she says.
“But for the generation of women sailors coming through behind me, it’s really cool to see what’s now possible for them.”
Fortunately, Aleh has hung in there long enough, so she can step into a new venture following her fourth Olympic campaign — as a driver in the five-strong Team NZ women’s crew.
She and Meech — as well as Nacra 17 sailor Erica Dawson — will go straight from the Olympic regatta at Marseille in August and into camp with Team NZ in Barcelona. The Women’s America’s Cup will be raced in September and October, overlapping the Louis Vuitton Challenger final and the America’s Cup match.
The day before her birthday, Aleh got to drive the AC40 for the first time. It was better than she’d imagined.
“For all the sailing I’ve done in the past, I never thought sailing these boats was a possibility — so you don’t want to stuff it up,” she says with a laugh.
“After having done a lot of work in the simulator, a lot of preparation, to then actually sail around, do some manoeuvres and settle in behind the wheel, was pretty amazing. From a helming point of view, it took a bit of getting used to the sensations and the reality of being on the water.
“But on the water turns out to be easier than the simulator, in the sense that you’ve got inputs — you can feel the boat and you can see the wind. Whereas on the sim, you’re definitely more like, ‘Oh the numbers, numbers, numbers’ on the screen.”
All five of the women’s crew, plus the five sailors in the youth crew (including women’s Olympic windsurfer Veerle ten Have) were in Auckland last week to sail the AC40 together for the first time. Team NZ virtually “handed over the keys” allowing the two crews to do their own thing with the boat.
The women are working with a coach, Olympic windsurfing bronze medallist Aaron McIntosh, who is an expert in foiling. Polly Powrie will be their manager in Barcelona.
Switching back and forth between two major sailing campaigns, with barely a day or two for rest, isn’t an upheaval, Aleh reckons.
“We definitely see it as a good thing. The AC40 is faster and there’s a big emphasis on communication, especially in my role as a driver,” she says.
“There are four people who need to sail this boat together, but you can’t see two of them. So communicating with them is really quite challenging. So I think it’s also great prep for the 49erFX and how we’re developing that conversation.”
Aleh and Meech’s Olympic coach, Javier Torres del Moral (who guided the Brazilian 49erFX crew to gold at the Tokyo Olympics), has encouraged them to be part of America’s Cup history.
“It’s also cool for us to break it up,” says Aleh. “We work hard when we’re in the FX and we know we’ve got a lot of intense hours coming up before the Olympics. And how cool is the fact we can do these different things within the same sport?
“Though it would be a lot harder if we weren’t in this together.”
Aleh had walked away from Olympic sailing after the 2016 Rio Games and tried her hand at myriad things — even an office job with EY. She tried out for a round-the-world race crew, went to the Tokyo Olympics as a coach for Dawson and Micah Wilkinson’s Nacra 17 crew, and sailed with Peter Burling and Blair Tuke in the New Zealand SailGP team.
But in 2022, Aleh was wooed back to the Olympics. She and Meech — the silver medallist in the 49erFX at the 2016 Rio Games with Alex Maloney — decided to pair up and make a run for Paris.
It took them a little while to get up to speed, but this month they won bronze at the French Olympic Week in Hyeres (only the second time they’d qualified for the final medal race since they joined forces).
“We’re definitely getting more moments in racing where it all comes together, but there are still a few little things letting us down,” Aleh says.
“We’ve got a list of work-ons between now and the Games. But the basics are there, we’re seeing progress, and over the next two months in Marseille we’ll just keep chipping away.” They head back to France next week.
Aleh admits as she’s matured, she’s got a lot better at managing her energy. In her early Olympic campaigns, she suffered stomach pains, recurring sinus infections and a stress fracture in her ankle because she wasn’t eating enough to balance the energy she was expending. She had the symptoms of RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport).
“It’s been great being in a boat where I’m a pretty good weight — I needed to be a little heavier. So it’s more about energy management — you’ve got to eat, you’ve got to refuel. It’s definitely taken a lot of stress out of it, and I’m so much more resilient,” she says. Torres del Moral is also great at helping Aleh and Meech find the right energy balance.
Rushing straight from an Olympic Games into an America’s Cup may need some managing too. But Aleh expects it will also give her “a great sense of relief”.
“When you’re doing an Olympics, you have this real difficult time afterwards of ‘Oh my God, I’ve been doing this every day for three years’ — or if you count all the other years before that it’s like 18 years — and you don’t know what you’re going to do next,” she says.
“For a few months with the America’s Cup, I get to delay that. There are a few of us in the same boat who’ll be needing to find something else after this.”
But she hopes this inaugural cup will lead to even more professional sailing opportunities for Kiwi women.
“We’re hoping that this event continues and even turns into more pathways in the future. I’ve been saying it for 10 to 15 years now, wouldn’t it be great if there was something else you could do beyond Olympic sailing?” Aleh says.
“And it’s just so cool to have this bunch of women to do it with. We’ve all known each other forever; we’ve come through the same transitions.
“Obviously, I’ve got a few years on all of them. But I’m the one who never gives up. The curve has finally caught up with me and, hopefully, it carries on. This is just the start.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.
Luna Rossa have been active in their recruitment drive for the next America's Cup.