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Megan Thomson at last year’s Congressional Cup in Long Beach. After success on the Women’s Tour Thomson is now focusing on the Open Tour, a tough call but given the adage ‘only play people better than you’ hopefully it will whizz her up a steep learning curve
is more than just a sport. It is a community as well.’ With no gender distinction in the Starling fleets, Thomson has
mixed it up in open fleets from a very young age – and has continued to do so ever since. She has competed against all-comers in the New Zealand Match Race Nationals and on up into international events including the Congressional Cup and the open World Match Race Tour. ‘My whole background has been mixed-gender racing,’ she says. ‘Then after Starlings I went into Lasers and that was the first time I was competing in split-gender fleets.’ In her first year at university she competed in Lasers at the 2015
Youth Worlds in Kingston, Ontario, but then put sailing on the back- burner as she concentrated on her studies in sport and outdoor education. While at university she also got a part-time job in the race office at the RNZYS, where ‘I got my arm twisted into joining their Youth Training Programme’. Once again she was back into mixed-gender racing, this time in keelboats. ‘Having come from singlehanded dinghy sailing, the Youth
Programme was my first taste of sailing in a team,’ she says. ‘That took a bit of adjustment! It taught me a lot about putting the right team together, but also then building the right kind of dynamic around you. That aspect was a massive learning for me. ‘It also gave me keelboat racing skills, particularly match racing.’
In that close-quarters, one-on-one battle of guile, skill and tactics, she had found her sailing métier. After a long and sometimes grinding road on the international
circuits, the 2.0 Racing Team – Megan Thomson, Josi Andres, Anna Merchant, Charlotte Porter and Tiana Wittey – put together their best result yet at the Jeddah Worlds. In a tough semi-final against world number two and two-time world champion Anna Östling and her Swedish crew, the Kiwi team clinched its place in the final with a 3-2 victory. They met their match in the final, however, when Pauline Courtois
and her powerful French crew capped a dominant year on the women’s tour to clinch the world title in convincing style – also completing a remarkable 21-0 sweep of the regatta. ‘Leading into the worlds we made a kind of soft alliance with the
Swedish team to do some training together and try to figure out how to knock Pauline off the top spot,’ says Thomson. ‘We called
28 SEAHORSE
it Project Pauline! We know that to beat her you have to sail perfect races. She has been doing this a long time and you can see that in the way she races. She doesn’t make mistakes or leave any room for you out there.’ There may have been an extra edge of steel and more than a
bit of vengeance behind the French team’s resolve when they faced off against Thomson and her crew for the world title. Six months earlier the Kiwis had bested the French on their home turf at Le Havre with a 2-0 victory in the third stage of the 2024 Women’s World Match Racing Tour. ‘For us that was almost bigger than the worlds,’ says Thomson.
‘It had been a while since anybody had been able to beat Pauline. Everything came together perfectly for us in that final. The conditions were pretty windy for the regatta with boats breaking and bodies falling apart. We managed to sail really clean races and it made us realise what we could achieve. ‘So we went into the worlds in Saudi Arabia knowing we had
beaten the French team before and believing it was possible to do it again. But after a long and tough regatta and a big semi-final battle we were all pretty tired coming into the final itself.’ Thomson’s competitive spirit has seen her more than willing to
take on the top teams in the men’s circuit too. She and her 2.0 Team campaigned through the 2022 World Match Racing Tour’s US Grand Slam, while also competing on the newly launched women’s tour, finishing fifth in both. The following year they went two better, finishing third in both. Then in the semi-final of the World Match Race Championship
in Shenzhen, China, Thomson squared off against the UK’s Ian Williams, who had already notched up more world match race titles than any other skipper in the history of the sport. In challenging light and flukey conditions the women never backed off, pushing the contest all the way to 2-2 and forcing a final deciding match. In the patchy conditions it was now a game of snakes and ladders,
with fortunes swinging wildly. At the final top mark the women parked up in a wind-hole, while Williams and his crew sailed up from behind and swept around and into the lead. To make matters worse, the women, with no way on, then drifted helplessly sideways into the mark and copped a penalty.
IAN ROMAN
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