Like Lauren Boyle before her, Aquablack Erika Fairweather looks to be carrying the can for New Zealand swimming. In February, Fairweather will compete at the World Aquatics long course swimming championships in Doha, offering the best chance New Zealand has ever had to win gold.
Fairweather, 19, is also one of just two Aquablacks – the other being Boyle at age 27 – to ever medal at both a world long course (50m) and a world short course (25m) swimming championship and is a rare swimming medal chance at the Paris Olympics in July.
She is ranked top four in the 400m and 800m freestyle this season and seventh in the 200m freestyle. Only one other New Zealand swimmer ranks in the top 16.
“Swimmer for swimmer, this will be one of the strongest squads we’ve taken away in a long time,” Swimming New Zealand’s Olympic Programme Lead, Gary Francis, says of the small eight member Doha squad.
He’s hoping that means medals for Fairweather and at least semi-finals for most others. In the past 30 years, only three swimmers have stood on a long course world championship podium, but two will be at Doha wanting to do it again. However, nobody from New Zealand has ever won gold.
Should Fairweather top the podium, Swimming New Zealand will be hoping that it will be a sniff in the air of an Olympic performance five months later that will lead to increased funding from High Performance Sport New Zealand.
Only one New Zealand woman, backstroker Jean Stewart in 1952, has ever won an Olympic swimming medal. They are as rare as hen’s teeth down under. The last Olympic swimming medals brought back to New Zealand were Danyon Loader’s two gold medals more than 27 years ago; no other swimmer has brought home an Olympic medal of any colour in the past 36 years. We’ve only ever had six medals in individual swimming events; Loader has half of them, and the only golds.
Like Loader and Stewart, Fairweather, who turns 20 later this month, is also from Dunedin. She’s lived and breathed swimming since she left Kavanagh College in 2022, where she was head girl. Following the black line in the pool is not a hobby for Fairweather; she is a high-performance athlete, training at the same Moana Pool that Loader did.
The championships in Doha are qualifiers for Paris. Just two Aquablacks, including Fairweather, have clocked under the tough Paris qualifying times since the July 2023 world championships in Fukuoka. Some will be looking to do good personal bests at Doha to participate in Paris, let alone perform, otherwise it’s back to the starting blocks at April trials in Hastings like everyone else.
Fairweather also became the world’s fifth female to break four minutes in the 400m freestyle. That, and world championship medals, got her and her coach Lars Humer deserved nominations for Halberg Awards this month. Fairweather was the only athlete to be nominated solely for swimming.
Last month she won the supreme award at the Māori Sports Awards, the second swimmer in successive years to do so after Lewis Clareburt won last year’s award. Fairweather (Ngāi Tahu) also won the Junior Māori Sportswomen of the Year award, after also winning it last year.
“I’m incredibly humbled to even be nominated into a category with such high performing athletes, let alone take it out,” Fairweather says of her top award. “I truly didn’t believe it was going to be me.”
In February, Fairweather will want to start off the competitive year well. She’s already, in 2019, tasted success on the world stage, winning a 200m freestyle World Junior title. Then in July should she get an Olympic swimming medal of any colour, she will be the only living New Zealand female to hold one. Others, like Anna Simcic, also from the South Island, and Boyle, have contested Olympic finals, as has Fairweather, the youngest New Zealand Olympian at Tokyo. None, however, stood on the podium.
Fairweather will get another crack before she turns 21. The two pinnacle events are jammed in this year due to Covid-19 adjustments. While former world record holder Li Bingjie and Australian world short course champion Lani Pallister will be at Doha, many will bypass Doha to focus on Paris, including Fairweather’s main competitors, American Katie Ledecky, Australian Ariarne Titmus, and Canada’s teen prodigy Summer McIntosh,17, making the path to gold more probable. Fairweather was ‘stoked’ to share a 400m freestyle podium with Ledecky and Titmus at Fukuoka, the race she clocked under four minutes.
“I really wanted to break that four-minute mark, that was my main goal,” she says.
“That race was one of the most hyped-up races of the meet, we had the world champion, the Olympic champion and the world record holder in the race. To be racing with them was special and to get up on the podium with them was so cool.”
That world record holder, fourth-placed McIntosh, who also broke four minutes that day, will also bypass Doha to focus on Paris.
Of this top crop – Fairweather has called most of them ‘big dogs’, but is now one herself – all but Fairweather are world record holders, three have held the world record in the 400m freestyle, (Pallister holds a world junior surf record), all but Fairweather have been world champions, and all but Fairweather and Pallister were absent from the Melbourne 2022 short course world championships, where Fairweather got two silver medals behind Pallister. Of the big dogs from the Commonwealth, only Fairweather has not medalled at a Commonwealth Games.
In addition, all but Pallister, Bingjie and Fairweather have beaten Ledecky, an Olympian since 2012, who has herself been unbeaten at a world championship in the 800m freestyle since 2013. On current form, Ledecky is one swimmer Fairweather may need to touch the wall ahead of to get on an Olympic podium in the 400m freestyle, in the same way she moved ahead of McIntosh to win a bronze medal in the 400m Fukuoka final, using her strong back-end speed, to be the first New Zealander for decades to beat a current world record holder.
McIntosh will be back. At the US Open in late November, she became the first swimmer to defeat Ledecky in the 400m freestyle in the US for 11 years. Titmus was ahead of her at both the Tokyo Olympics, and at Fukuoka in a world record time, but she recently went public on abdominal surgery after having benign tumours removed from an ovary in September.
So, Fairweather will be at Doha as will Tokyo 400m freestyle bronze medallist Li Bingjie, who came fifth in the 400m at Fukuoka but missed the short course world championships due to contracting Covid-19 upon arrival in Melbourne. It’s New Zealand’s most promising opportunity ever to get a long course world swimming title. In addition, Fairweather is assisting the women’s 4x200m relay team to qualify for Paris. With three swimmers – including Eve Thomas and Laticia Transom – clocking under two minutes at trials in the 200m freestyle, New Zealand has a solid chance of qualifying well. It’s the last chance, too. At Fukuoka, the top three relays qualified for Paris. At Doha, the next 12 fastest will.
Fairweather was also unbeaten in the 400m freestyle at three World Cup series meets in Europe last year. She was one of just seven women to win the ‘triple crown’ in an event at the series, winning her $10,000, part of more than $40,000 prizemoney in three weeks. At the first stop in Berlin, she broke a world cup record, held by Boyle back in 2015.
“It was super exciting. I was just stoked I was able to pull it off,” she says of her triple crown three-peat. “It was awesome to take out that record on my first swim. I love every opportunity to race the 400m freestyle, so to do it three weeks in a row was so cool.
“I think there is something really beneficial in finishing strong in the last 50m so that’s been my game plan.”
She will want to back herself and maximise that game plan to post good times next month in the 400m and 800m events in Doha. She is also swimming the 200m freestyle.
But the real test will be five months later in Paris when the top dogs show up.
