As a kid, Erica Dawson never owned one of those annoying little Tamagotchi digital pets. As a teen, she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in home video games and wasn’t addicted to playing Angry Birds on her phone, either.
But now, on the cusp of entering her 30s, Dawson has become a bit of a gamer.
She’s had to – to earn her place on New Zealand’s first all-women’s America’s Cup crew.
“I’ll be honest, I never thought I’d become a gamer. I’ve had to adopt it,” the Olympic sailor says.
Virtual sailing is quickly becoming second nature to Dawson, one of five Kiwi sailors representing Emirates Team New Zealand in the Women’s America’s Cup in Barcelona later this year.
Sailing an AC40, the foiling monohull to be used in the women’s and youth Cup regattas, is acutely different to any other yacht Dawson has sailed.
Right now, she’s in Europe, preparing for her second Olympic Games (in 100 days time) with sailing partner Micah Wilkinson, on the Nacra 17 foiling catamaran.
Dawson’s role on board is physical – trimming the sails, running up and down the side of the boat while it’s up on the foiling daggerboards, trying to keep it flying level. Her hands are calloused and sometimes bleeding after a day on the water.
Her role as a trimmer on the AC40 is, in comparison, much more sedate. It’s still sailing on a knife edge – requiring the four crew on board to be highly coordinated, accurate and alert – but they’re all tucked inside the hull for the entirety of a race.
Grinders have been replaced by battery power, and an autopilot control system maintains stable flight.
Dawson, 29, will spend the race controlling the jib and mainsail with buttons, sitting in the ‘go-kart seat’ behind one of the two drivers on board and passing on critical information about the boat’s speed and performance.
“It’s quite different to any other sailing that I’ve done, now you’re using buttons and toggles and a lot of numbers,” Dawson says. “But at the end of the day, it’s still sailing, and you’re trying to achieve the same thing with the same forces; the same principles apply. There’s the same stress and heart rates will still be up.
“We’re learning new motor skills, which come with time. But we’ve picked things up reasonably quickly through the sailing experience we’ve had.”
The simulator game Team NZ created, using 10 years of research and development, is now available to the public – last week a free version of the game was released, called AC Sailing. There will even be an e-sports world championship, the America’s Cup E-series, also raced in Barcelona during the America’s Cup.
But Dawson makes it clear – you couldn’t be simply a hot-shot gamer to sail one of the actual 40-foot speed machines. You need to be a sailor, she says, to understand what to do with the boat in different situations.
“The purpose of the game was initially for the trials to get in the women’s and youth crews. So I just played it at home in my spare time,” she says. “A few of us were learning how to game at the same time so we bounced ideas off each other.
“Now that I’m part of Team NZ, it’s a mixture of sailing on the simulator – where you’re still on the game but co-ordinating with three other people – and getting time on the boat.
Dawson has yet to step on an AC40. Team NZ’s boat was stuck in Jeddah over the summer, and arrived back in the country just as Dawson was leaving. She’ll return at the end of next month to finally experience sailing a real Cup boat, rather than a graphicised image of one.
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So far Dawson has managed to balance both an Olympic and an America’s Cup campaign – arguably the two pinnacle events in world sailing. “It’s definitely my biggest year yet,” she says. “It’s pretty surreal to have the opportunity to sail in both.”
She’d always imagined women sailing in the America’s Cup as “something very far away”.
“I’d always heard the stories of Leslie Egnot and the women’s Mighty Mary crew sailing [in 1995], and I thought that was pretty cool,” Dawson says. “But then the America’s Cup got into the big cats and fewer sailors were on board – and it became more physical. So it was getting harder and harder for women.
“But the AC 40 has created such a cool opportunity now to get women involved without the physicality of it.”
Dawson and Wilkinson spent the past summer sailing their Nacra17 in her home city of Auckland, a lot of it alongside the Dutch crew of Laila van der Meer and Bjarne Bouwer.
“We’ve been going full-on and made some good gains over the summer. In Europe we’ll find out just how much the rest of the fleet gained as well,” Dawson says.
Last week, the Kiwis finished ninth at the Princess Sofia Regatta in Majorca, discovering they had gained in some areas and slipped in others. “The to-do list is ever-growing,” Dawson says.
Now they’re in the south of France, training in La Grande Motte before the world championships in early May. That will be their final event before the Olympics are sailed at the Mediterranean port of Marseille, in July.
Dawson and Wilkinson have some demons to conquer – having finished 12th at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, only a month after Dawson fractured her fibula in a freak training accident.
The march to these Olympics feels different than the last, Dawson says: “We feel a lot stronger, a lot more structured. We have a really cool support team around us.” They have a new coach in Spaniard Anton Paz.
“We can see there’s potential there, so we’re trying to give ourselves every chance possible of winning a medal. It feels like there’s still so much to learn in this boat, so it’s about prioritising and seeing where we can make the biggest gains.”
The pair have now sailed together for five years and have evolved a deep understanding of how each other ticks, on and off the boat.
Dawson has a similar feeling about the women she’ll be sailing with in Barcelona; women who she’s sailed either with or against for most of her life.
“We all know each other so well, so it’s cool to get us all together on one boat,” she says.
Team NZ crewmate Jo Aleh coached Dawson at the last Olympics, and last year they sailed together with Molly Meech (another Cup crew member) to win the inaugural 69F Women Foiling Gold Cup on Lake Garda. She used to sail against them in the 49erFX.
Dawson recently posted a photo of herself and another crewmate, Liv Mackay, as teens sailing at the 420 nationals in 2012. They’ve also been part of New Zealand’s SailGP crew over the past few years.
“It’s a small sailing community in New Zealand, which could give us an advantage because we’ve known each other so long,” says Dawson. Team NZ will be one of 12 teams in the Women’s America’s Cup. “We haven’t sailed in teams of this size, so it will be a cool test.”
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In the busiest year of her sailing career, Dawson has paused her university studies.
She’s studying to become a Master of Sustainable Development Goals, focusing on environmental sustainability, through Massey University (she already has a business degree in accounting and finance). She started her Master’s in 2022 and plans to finish it next year.
“I’ve had an interest in sustainability for quite a while now,” says Dawson, attracted to the degree because it was “less science-y, and more conceptual and practical”.
“I don’t know where I’m going to end up in the future, but sustainability is something I’d love to explore further. The marine side is obviously my passion, but I’m interested in other areas as well.”
Dawson has already worked with Blake – the environmental foundation set up in memory of former Team NZ head Sir Peter Blake – going into schools to teach kids about our marine environment.
And she’s also helped out at Live Ocean – the conservation charity founded by current Team NZ sailors Peter Burling and Blair Tuke.
“I’ve been around pretty cool organisations working in the ocean space and I’ve been very inspired by them around how important it is to protect our oceans and reduce our emissions,” she says. “It’s a passion that’s been sitting alongside my sailing for quite a while now.
“Although I don’t have my head in my studies right now, sustainability is also in everything you do in your daily actions.”
Dawson is a person who likes being busy: “I don’t know what to do with myself otherwise.”
She could be gaming.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “It would be training, right?”
