D2 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, DECEMBER 25 , 2021
Federation canceled the under-18
women’s world championship
for the second straight year over
covid-19 concerns, drawing sharp
criticism with the men’s world
junior hockey championship
opening this weekend in Canada.
The IIHF announced thattournaments scheduled to begin
in January were canceled
because of the rapid spread of
the omicron variant. The U-18
championship was scheduled to
take place Jan. 8-15 in Sweden.
— From news services
and staff reportsTELEVISION AND RADIO
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Noon Atlanta at New York » ESPN
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10:30 p.m. Dallas at Utah » ESPN
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
2:30 p.m. Camellia Bowl: Georgia State vs. Ball State » ESPN
MEN’S COLLEGE BASKETBALL
1:30 p.m. Diamond Head Classic, consolation game: Wyoming vs. South Florida »
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4 p.m. Diamond Head Classic, consolation game: Northern Iowa vs. Hawaii »
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6:30 p.m. Diamond Head Classic, third place: Liberty vs. BYU » ESPN 2
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BOXING
6 p.m. PBC Fight Night: Kenneth Sims Jr. vs. Kareem Martin (junior lightweights) »
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SOCCER
8 a.m. Turkish Super Lig: Antalyaspor at Galatasaray » beIN Sports
11 a.m. Turkish Super Lig: Istanbul Basaksehir at Trabzonspor » beIN SportsHOCKEY
NHL’s return to play
pushed back one day
The NHL pushed back its
return from an already extended
holiday break an extra day by
postponing its entire 14-game
Monday schedule for
coronavirus testing reasons.
The league said Friday it now
plans to resume play Tuesday in
a decision that increases the
total of postponed games to 64
this season. The Washington
Capitals’ home game against the
Ottawa Senators on Monday was
among the contests affected by
the announcement.
Teams are still scheduled to
resume practicing Sunday but
won’t be allowed to take the ice
until players, coaches and
traveling officials are cleared
following a round of coronavirus
tests. The decision to delay the
resumption of play will allow
what the NHL called “an
adequate opportunity to analyze
leaguewide testing results and to
assess clubs’ readiness to play.”
The move comes after the
NHL opened its annual holiday
break Wednesday, two days
earlier than scheduled, because
of a significant jump in players
landing in the league’s covid-19
protocols and with 10 teams’
schedules paused.
The rash of postponed games
led the NHL to withdraw from
participating in the Winter
Olympics. The league will use its
previously scheduled Olympic
break in February to make up its
postponed games to complete an
82-game season.
Toronto forward William
Nylander entered the NHL’s
covid-19 protocols Friday, giving
the Maple Leafs 13 players on the
list.COLLEGE BASKETBALL
The Maryland men’s
basketball game against Loyola
(Md.) scheduled for Tuesday was
canceled because of coronavirus
protocols in the Loyola program,
the schools announced.
Maryland is looking for a
replacement opponent. The
Terps (6-4) haven’t played since
Dec. 12, when they knocked off
then-No. 20 Florida at Barclays
Center in Brooklyn.
— Emily Giambalvo
No. 5 UCLA’s men’s basketball
home games against No. 6
Arizona on Thursday and
Arizona State on Jan. 1 werepostponed because of a
coronavirus outbreak within the
Bruins program.SOCCER
A coronavirus outbreak at
Everton forced the
postponement of the club’s
match at Burnley, the Premier
League said.
It’s the third game of the
Boxing Day lineup to be
postponed. The Sunday program
still features six games.
The Premier League has called
off 13 matches because of
coronavirus issues in two weeks,
with players having to isolate
after testing positive or if they
are unvaccinated and a close
contact of a coronavirus case....
American midfielder Richard
Ledezma signed a contract
extension with Dutch club PSV
Eindhoven, a deal announced
after he returned from a torn
ACL to play his first match in
more than a year.
The 21-year-old’s new contract
runs through the 2023-24
season.MISC.
Two-time Olympic champion
Yuzuru Hanyu returned from a
long injury layoff to land twoquadruple jumps and score a
world-leading 111.31 points in his
short program at the Japanese
championships in Saitama.
The 27-year-old Hanyu, who
has been out for eight months
with an ankle injury, punched
the air with his fist after
finishing his clean program. He
landed a quad Salchow, a quad
toe-triple toe combination and a
triple axel to post a score nearly
five points ahead of American
Nathan Chen’s score at Skate
Canada.
Hanyu and Chen are expected
to go toe-to-toe for Olympic gold
at the Beijing Games.
Hanyu, who intends to try to
land the first quad axel in
competition in his free skate
Sunday, leads reigning Olympic
silver medalist Shoma Uno by
nearly 10 points....
The Miami Heat announced
that center Dewayne Dedmon is
expected to miss no more than
two weeks with a sprained MCL
in his left knee.
Dedmon suffered the injury
Thursday in Miami’s win over
Detroit. He is averaging
6.5 points and 6.1 rebounds in
17 minutes per game this
season....
The International Ice HockeyDIGEST
nations to bring its total to 10. The
tour represents “without a doubt”
the highest level of competitive
sailing, said Spithill, who noted
that unlike the two-boat Ameri-
ca’s Cup, every SailGP team has
access to the same technology and
data — and thus has “no excuses.”
What the U.S. team also does
not have, according to the
42-year-old helmsman, is a regu-
lar supply of the kind of athletic
sailors the new breed of foiling
boats demand. To that end and to
widen its demographic appeal,
his team launched its own initia-
tive, Foiling First, which is meant
to provide both a pathway to the
sport’s higher levels and another
avenue for diversity.
For Perez, who joined Spithill
and other team members several
weeks ago in a Foiling First camp
in Chicago, the program is impor-
tant because it could help “in-
crease accessibility for communi-
ties less exposed to sailing.”
“You didn’t see many people
who came from communities of
color; you didn’t see lots of fe-
males,” Perez said of the boat
clubs where she began compet-
ing. “So that kind of lack of repre-
sentation is a huge problem, and
it’s hard for a person like myself to
kind of see themselves achieving
at the highest levels of the sport if
there’s no representation.
“Everyone should have the op-
portunity to experience this
sport,” Perez added, “and have a
shot at pursuing it to the highest
level.”
In that light, Perez declared
that foiling was not just an excit-
ing version of sailing but “a re-
birth.”
“We have this opportunity
right now, with foiling,” she said.
“It’s just such a new form of sail-
ing — it’s totally different than the
standard concept of sailing....
We can create a new face of sail-
ing.”
[email protected]it has to offer,” and she has since
taken up surfing and windsurf-
ing, both with and without foils.
She also plans to be with the U.S.
team, whether in the boat or help-
ing in race preparations, when
SailGP ends its second season
with a final event in San Francisco
in March. Before that, the circuit
made its penultimate stop this
past weekend in Australia, where
the U.S. squad tried out another
woman, Anna Weis, who compet-
ed on a smaller foiled catamaran
at the Tokyo Olympics.
“These boats,” Spithill said of
the F50s, “they’re aggressive,
they’re fast and there’s risk there,
so you need to have a roster with
some depth.”
All that speed and danger, par-
ticularly as handled by eight
boats stocked with top talent and
packed into a tight course, are
major selling points for SailGP,
which announced recently that
its third season will begin in May
with teams from two additionalthe top of high-performance pro-
fessional sailing it has been a
male-dominated sport, but so
have most sports,” Mills said via
email. “It’s great to see there is a
now real step change across the
industry to be more inclusive and
supportive.”
Among the many unlikely as-
pects of Perez’s status in sailing is
that before she took it up, she
didn’t surf or engage in any of the
aquatic sports readily available to
Hawaiians. While she was a regu-
lar beachgoer, her athletic inter-
ests tended toward land-based
sports such as volleyball, tennis
and track. But her proximity to
water gave her opportunities to
spot from afar an activity that
struck her as compelling.
“So I begged my parents to sign
me up for spring break sailing
camp,” Perez said, “and my pas-
sion for the sport really grew from
there.”
Once she got into a skiff, Perez
“fell in love with the ocean and allspeeds.
“Kids four to five years older
than her, none of them are going
foiling at such an early age,” he
said. “She’s at the cutting edge of a
new generation, who are learning
on both the O’pen Skiff and going
right into foiling.”
Describing older sailboat mod-
els as “bathtubs with sails,” Sayre
said they did not provide as ap-
pealing an entry into the sport.
“It’s like learning with a type-
writer when these kids are used to
iPhones,” he said. “So she learned
with an iPhone and just took off
from there.”
Perez and Moroz also benefited
from the Women’s Pathway Pro-
gram, which Perez said was “real-
ly hopeful for the future of women
in sailing.” Hannah Mills, a two-
time Olympic gold medalist and
three-time world champion who
joined Britain’s SailGP team un-
der the program, echoed Perez in
hailing it as “a huge positive.”
“There is no hiding that right atsplash in competitive sailing until
2001, when a hydrofoil-equipped
Moth boat won a world champi-
onship event in Australia. The
technological innovation hit the
big time — and proved there was
no going back — when the 2013
America’s Cup featured foiling
catamarans that enthralled the
world with a duel in which Spith-
ill and Team USA rallied from an
8-1 deficit to stun a New Zealand-
based challenger in San Francis-
co.
The Ocean Race, sailing’s other
traditional heavyweight crewed
event, has since incorporated foil-
ing, as have the Olympics.
“That’s the future,” Spithill
said. “That’s what people want to
do.”
His team’s emphasis on foiling
skills over traditional sailing ex-
perience was underlined by the
selection of 20-year-old Daniela
Moroz, the five-time reigning
women’s kitefoil world cham-
pion, who accompanied Perez in
joining the SailGP squad in April
after they were initially recruited
as part of the Women’s Pathway
Program.
“Daniela and CJ both bring to
our team an impressive amount
of foiling ability, which is para-
mount to racing at this level,”
Spithill said then.
Moroz began learning how to
sail a WASZP and develop some
techniques that can translate to
the F50, while Perez initially re-
mained in Hawaii because of her
youth. The relatively affordable
WASZP boat only started to be-
come available around the time
Perez started sailing, and it was
not lost on Sayre that she was able
to cut her teeth in the sport just as
foiling in various forms was more
accessible than ever before. It also
helped, he noted, that the now
15-year-old O’pen Skiff is a faster
vessel than most of its predeces-
sors, and thus Perez had less of an
adjustment to make to foilingsport is taking steps to become
more inclusive.
“I’ve been given so much,” Per-
ez said, “and I feel it is a part of my
responsibility to also give back
and try to break down these barri-
ers that have historically exclud-
ed many people in the sailing
community.”
Foiling refers to the use of wa-
tercraft with hydrofoils, winglike
appendages that protrude from
the bottoms of boats and boards.
Perez’s proficiency at foiling land-
ed her a coveted spot with the U.S.
team after an open call for appli-
cants for SailGP’s Women’s Path-
way Program, an initiative aimed
at increasing gender diversity on
all of its teams, elicited interest
from highly accomplished and ex-
perienced women across a range
of aquatic disciplines.
All teams in SailGP, which rep-
resents eight nations, use one-de-
sign F50 catamarans that boast a
predicted top speed of over
60 mph and have approached
that mark in races. As the boats
pick up speed, their foils push the
twin hulls entirely out of the wa-
ter, vastly reducing drag and hur-
tling them past the 50-knot
(57.5-mph) barrier.
“They are incredible and flat-
out dangerous,” Nevin Sayre, who
runs U.S. Sailing’s youth-oriented
O’pen Skiff Class, said of the F50s.
“For the average sailor to get in a
boat like that, they’re scared out
of their mind because you’re go-
ing from a bicycle to a Porsche.”
Perez, however, is far from an
average sailor. She began her ca-
reer in 2016 on an O’pen Skiff
(then called an O’pen Bic) and got
so good so quickly that by March
2017 she finished fourth at the
North American championships.
The next year, she became the
first female competitor to win the
title outright. She followed that
by finishing as the top female
competitor and placing sixth in
the under-17 group at the 2019
O’pen Bic world championships
in Auckland, New Zealand.
Perez then moved on to a 29er,
another high-performance craft
aimed at younger sailors, before
starting to hone her foiling skills
in 2020 on a WASZP, another
one-person boat. The coronavirus
pandemic erased any traveling
she might have done that year to
competitions, but it also gave Per-
ez the relatively little time she
needed to attain such mastery of
the craft that when she showed up
in early October at the 2021
WASZP national championships
in Toms River, N.J., she defeated
an all-ages field.
By then, Perez already had
been selected for the SailGP team,
and within days she was off to
Cadiz for an F50 adventure that
was, as she put it, “just the coolest
thing ever.”
U.S. SailGP skipper Jimmy
Spithill said that when he and
other team officials first saw vid-
eo of Perez foiling away in her
WASZP, they were “not sure if she
had done any racing at all or had
been sort of sailing around on her
own and learning it, [but] you
could see that she had a lot of
natural talent.”
“We just saw a huge amount of
potential,” added Spithill, who led
Oracle Team USA to America’s
Cup victories in 2010 and 2013.
A native of Australia who re-
sides in San Diego, Spithill has
long been a prominent advocate
for foiling, which dates back ap-
proximately a century in its earli-
est forms but didn’t make a major
SAILING FROM D1
18-year-old helps sailing ride a wave of change
RICARDO PINTO FOR SAILGP
CJ Perez, the first Latina athlete to race in SailGP, sat behind Jimmy Spithill, CEO and helmsman of the U.S. team, during an October practice session for an event in Spain.BOB MARTIN FOR SAILGP
SailGP’s Women’s Pathway Program is an initiative aimed at increasing gender diversity in the sport.