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Megan Thomson found herself looking over at her opponent and wondering how she had got to this point.
Here she was, lining up against Dave Perry who, among other things, was a multiple Congressional Cup winner and US match racing champion and in 1992 had been voted into the Sailing World Hall of Fame. He had also authored many books on match racing and led hundreds of instructional seminars.
It was a satisfying moment, then, when Thomson and her 2.0 Women's Racing Team beat Perry at last week's Thompson Cup.
"Matching up against Dave Perry was a pretty big highlight for us, given we have all read his match racing play book and he quite literally wrote half the plays," Thomson said. "To line up against a legend like that was a pretty cool moment, for sure."
Perry wasn't the only scalp on a day when Thomson won eight of her nine flights, notably a couple against some of the world's best, to qualify for the finals series in second.
That finals series didn't pan out as the team hoped, losing to Australia's Cole Tapper 2-1 in the quarter-finals, but it emphasised the potential they have with the Women's Match Racing World Championships due to be hosted in Auckland in November.
"Those races weren’t perfect and that’s the most exciting part for us," Thomson said. "Even though it was an almost perfect track record, we could pull apart every one of them and find something to improve on.
"It was great having such a cool result like that. We are more excited by the potential we all saw in how much we can grow."
Their fifth-placed finish at the Thompson Cup was the culmination of the US Grand Slam, a four-event series of match racing events - Chicago Match Cup, Detroit Cup, Oakcliff International and Thompson Cup - sailed over a four-week period.
The 2.0 Women's Racing Team with coach Reuben Corbett.
It was an important tour for a number of reasons for Thomson and her team of Ellie Copeland (main), Anna Merchant (trim and pit), Chelsea Rees (trim), Josi Andres (bow and mast) and Serena Woodall (bow).
"That whole Grand Slam, we looked at that as training for the women’s worlds," Thomson explained. "When we eyed up the women’s worlds, we sat down and tried to work out our biggest weakness and for us after Covid it was having not raced internationally for a couple of years. The next thing was what was the most cost-effective way to get as much racing as possible and we saw the Grand Slam as the best option there.
"Those four weeks away were pretty valuable. It worked out in the end that we did 71 races across that time, which is quite a lot of racing when you think of it like that. Every venue and every boat brought its own challenge for us and we just felt like we warmed into an event and then you’d go to another and a whole set of new challenges."
It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that their best results came at the final event, the Thompson Cup, when they sailed in the same boat and at the same venue as the previous week.
Three top-five results represents a decent return and also meant they finished sixth on the overall standings.
Chris Poole took out the US Grand Slam, finishing ahead of 2022 ILCA 7 (Laser) world champion Jean-Baptiste Bernaz, and New Zealand's Robbie McCutcheon was eighth.
The Women's Match Racing World Championships, to be hosted by the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, will double as the culmination of the inaugural Women’s World Match Racing Tour.
It will see 14 skippers invited to take part, including last year’s champion and world No 1 Pauline Courtois and her Match in Pink by Normandy Elite Team. Thomson and fellow Kiwi Celia Willison have already got invitations to compete and a wildcard spot is also available to the winner of the 2022 New Zealand Women’s Match Racing Championship.
Those New Zealand championships will prove invaluable preparation, especially with many of the international teams also competing, and Thomson will also compete at next month's 2022 Harken New Zealand Match Racing Championship.
"We are really excited after the last month to get home and jump back into it," she said.
They will also have a few more pages of their own playbook up their sleeves.
