At racing speeds, “There’s not much time to think,” Hannah Mills said. She would know.
The British Olympian’s role in Mubadala Abu Dhabi SailGP — as the strategist aboard Emirates GBR — is to see and synthesize wind streaks, closing speeds, risks, whatever she sees around her or on the screen in front of her. And then, see what’s changed now, a few seconds later.
With SailGP returning to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, this time for its season finale Saturday and Sunday, it marks the fifth season that each team is required to include at least one woman.
Early results of that requirement were uneven, but it raised the game for SailGP, which also added the crew position of strategist that top female sailors have mostly filled. The strategist feeds big-picture information to crewmates who are too focused to look around.
SailGP now has women in multiple roles, including Martine Grael driving for Mubadala Brazil with a male strategist, the Olympian Paul Goodison.
Liv Mackay is the strategist for New Zealand’s team, coming aboard soon after the position was introduced in Season 2, and earning her spot in a tryout rather than with medals and championships. Mackay brought skills as a skipper of smaller foiling catamarans and developed into a core player.
The team’s driver, Peter Burling, is accustomed to acting rapid-fire on rapid-fire input. “You get to a stage where you expect key information at a key time,” he said about the strategist’s role. “It would hurt to not have that.”
He remembers 2019 and the first SailGP races, “struggling to get around the course” in unrefined boats with no input from a strategist aboard or a coach ashore in a video booth.
Although “communications are my primary role,” Mackay said, “I also drive the boat out of maneuvers, while Pete runs across the boat to his new steering station.”
“When the wind goes light and we sail with fewer crew, I move to the front to manage jib trim and grinding,” she said. “Comms duty then flows to our wing-sail trimmer, Blair Tuke.”
The list of wins for the Burling/Tuke combination includes world championships, Olympic gold and the America’s Cup. No matter who is on the case, Mackay said, “The key is trust.”
Heading into the finale, New Zealand’s Black Foils is second for the season with 10 first-place finishes and 24 top threes. Team GBR leads with 11 wins and 29 top threes.
Unlike Black Foils, the British team on Emirates GBR never sends the strategist forward. “We place that much importance on Hannah’s role,” the driver Dylan Fletcher said.
Observing that he operates with less input from an onshore coach than other drivers, he said, “One of our strengths is relying on the people on the boat. I go with Hannah’s calls 99 percent of the time.” If he disagrees, Mills said, “we just crack on and deal with it in debrief.”
Fletcher and Mills were never on the same boat before SailGP, Mills said, “but we grew up together” through the British system of developing Olympic sailing teams. The process led both to gold, and they marched together under their country’s flag at Tokyo in 2020.
The female strategists of SailGP are a conspicuous element of the first generation of women to gain a foothold at the high end of sailing. Olympic sailing included women in the Games at Paris in 1900, but then what?
Now, 10 of the 12 team strategists in SailGP are women.
Mills’s two gold and one silver medal were won in a pursuit of personal excellence. Today, she is the mother of a 3-year-old, and SailGP is making that work. Asked if she could have combined motherhood with the intensity of Olympic training, she laughed. No is the only possible answer.
Now she finds herself at a different pinnacle of the sport. “I fly to the venue on Tuesday, and I fly out on Sunday night or Monday,” she said. “I have a family life.”
Even though Mills’s earlier racing was in slower boats, she said, “When I came to the F50, I was pleasantly surprised that what the driver needed to know was pretty much what anyone skippering any race boat would need to know.”
It matters that SailGP’s boats are fast enough to hurt people, and they’re getting faster. “A constantly evolving beast” Burling calls it.
Communications run through headsets built into helmets, and part of the training is learning when to talk so that only one person speaks at once.
The strategist sees a flood of data on the screen, but with the risk of interruption. Eyeballs come first.
Burling said that his Black Foils team “has won the last three events in the U.A.E.” in shifty winds and flat water.
Very light conditions can be the most hectic, as he described, with boats going different speeds at different angles, and they don’t want “surprise interactions; when you subtract crew to lighten the boat, you’re going slower but working harder.”
In light winds, likely at Abu Dhabi, a mistake can drop the boat off foils for a huge loss. Even an almost-imperceptible extra two knots of breeze puffing out there, somewhere, could make a winning difference between foiling or not.
The strategist’s role is to see that and report, or to make the right bet, most of the time. Where else would a Type A want to be?
“There is no way,” Mackay said, “I’m leaving SailGP by choice.”
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