As tradition dictates, the best sailors of 2022 were recently awarded the same iconic yachting timepieces that Ted Turner and Dennis Conner once earned for steering 65-foot America’s Cup yachts to victory 50 years ago. But tradition be damned when it comes to the sailing craft commanded by this year’s Rolex Yachtswoman and Yachtsman of the Year, Daniela Moroz and Ravi Parent.
No more pushing lead-ballasted yachts through the water—their foil-borne sailing craft literally fly above the waves. Instead of spinning a well-oiled steering wheel, Moroz and Parent engage in an intense, competitive dance that combines balance and strength to pilot their craft at speeds that are faster than the wind.
At age 25, Parent found an extra gear last year and became world champion in both the A Cat and F18 catamaran classes, while also winning the F18 European title. Moroz, the reigning champ in the Olympic Formula Kite class, revitalized her lagging campaign last fall and decisively won a sixth consecutive world title. She was rewarded with her fourth Rolex—the same night she turned 22.
Their stories differ, but Parent and Moroz share a similar commitment and appreciation for the value of the long hours of training required to feel at one with these craft as you sail on a knife’s edge. “I feel the boat, I can feel the wind, I can feel the water,” says Parent. “I remind myself to live in the moment … foiling and going fast.”
The Formula Kite, says Moroz, “is the most feel-based Olympic class. If you have slightly better feel than your competitors, it could prevent a wipeout, which is race-ending.”
Moroz burst on the scene at age 15, capturing the 2016 Formula Kite world title. She had first learned to sail a foiling kiteboard on windy San Francisco Bay a few years earlier and began racing against top male sailors who always had a weight advantage. She had to make up for that with better technique.“I was really lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and to be able to accumulate all those hours early on,” she says.
Born to parents who raced windsurfers, Moroz was lucky, but she made the most of it, winning every women’s world championship since 2016 except the cancelled 2020 event. When the Formula Kite was selected for the 2024 Olympics, she was the instant gold-medal favorite. Last spring, she paused her business studies at the University of Hawaii to train full-time.
Inevitably, international competition heated up as the class aimed for the 2024 Games, and last summer, Moroz was no longer winning every regatta. “It was the first proper time that people were actually catching up to me,” she says. She flew home from Europe in August, tired and burned out.
Moroz had always blamed speed problems on herself and doubled down to improve her technique. This time, she realized “something was off with my equipment.” Moroz decided to hire a full-time coach, the former foiling Moth dinghy champion Chris Rashley, and they arranged a three-week test of 17 kites before the 2022 Worlds in Italy.
She also brought in her friend Nathan Berg, who she says is “super good with the numbers and data and those technical things where I’ve always struggled.” Berg put together a database and equipment program to help her be “more organized and streamlined,” she says.
But first, she took a week off to go wing-foiling with friends at the Columbia River Gorge and give herself a mental break.
Although his parents were not high-performance sailors, Ravi Parent found his way to sailing in Florida aboard a Manatee River pram in Palmetto, then moved to the Sarasota Sailing Squadron, where he discovered the excitement of F18 and F16 catamarans.
“The summer camps and growing up sailing was always more about being with my friends who liked to be outdoors and have fun,” Parent says. “But I was always trying to go a little faster than my friends.”
The technical side of catamarans caught his interest, too. “I’m sort of a fiddly, boat-tweaky kind of person,” he says. “I like to see how boats work.”
As a teenager, Parent’s skills blossomed. He won the US Sailing Youth Championships and the F16 nationals (twice), and then finished 4th in the multihull class at the World Youth Championship at age 18.
As an engineering student at Boston University, Parent raced monohull dinghies on the Charles River, then joined the US Sailing Team to campaign the foiling NACRA 17 for the Olympics, beginning in 2018. He didn’t earn a berth to go to Tokyo but landed a part-time job instead with catamaran designers Morelli & Melvin and moved to Long Beach, California. He began racing the foiling A Cat, an extremely technical one-person foiler, and continued to race the two-person F18.
At Morelli & Melvin, Parent has focused on foil design and construction to equip new production and custom power cats. While he downplays the edge he might gain from studying foils all day, he says that studying the construction makes him sometimes realize when he might be pushing up against the structural limits of the foils.
Parent learned the most from the Olympic campaign, he says, including how to organize his life. In a campaign, he says, you have to organize your off-the-water stuff to get yourself and your boat ready and plan your sailing schedule. On the water, it taught him how to train in a focused, productive way.
Winning the 2020 A-Cat Worlds was Parent’s goal, but Covid postponed the regatta both in 2020 and 2021 so he kept training: “It gave me more time to do better and just put in the work,” he says. When the event finally happened in Houston in 2022, Parent won three of the first four races and went on to win the competition.
Something must have clicked during all those practice hours on the A Cat that spilled over to the (non-foiling) F18 class. Pete Melvin loaned Parent a brand-new boat just before the 2021 F18 America’s Championship, and after putting the boat together, he and his crew, Nick Lovisa, won the regatta, finishing first in the last four races.
“The F18 is heavier and responds a little slower than the A Cat,” says Parent, “so I felt like I had more time to deal with things.” In other words, time may slow down for you when a foiling sailor shifts back to a non-foiling boat.
Parent was offered another loaner for the 2022 F18 Europeans on Lake Garda, Italy, in July, so he recruited Severin Gramm, with whom he had sailed briefly in the Nacra 17. The team did not practice ahead of time and had no expectations. But after five days of tuning up on Lake Garda, Parent’s feel for going fast and Gramm’s ability to improve their crew work put them at the top of the fleet throughout the regatta.
Parent and Gramm paired up again for the F18 Worlds in Clearwater, Florida, in October and found the same speed and teamwork, beating 60 other teams to claim the title.
Putting the summer’s ups and downs behind her, Daniel Moroz set a laser focus on the World Championship in Cagliari, Sardinia, in October.
As planned, she and her team spent three weeks in Hyeres, France, testing kites, and she hit the gym every day to build muscle mass. Then Moroz skipped the European Championships and went straight into two weeks of training at Poetto Beach, site of the Worlds.
“I never felt more ready to deliver my best performance,” she wrote in her blog. She had met weekly with a sport psychologist and practiced mindfulness, meditation and visualizing to build a strong and confident mindset. Plus, she felt super fit.
When the regatta got underway, Moroz won every race in the qualifying series in a variety of winds and entered the finals as the No. 1 seed, needing only to win one race while the other three finalists would have to win twice.
The breeze picked up before the first race and the other three women switched from 15-meter to 11-meter kites. Moroz stayed with her larger kite. At the start, her closest rival, Lauriane Nolot (FRA), gained just a slight lead to start the first race but then, at the first mark, abruptly crashed. Moroz flew ahead and extended her lead to 300 meters, winning the race and then the championship.
Now, Moroz is focused on the major events of 2023 as prelude to the Olympics. She’s been in Miami and Clearwater and is headed for European regattas, intent on qualifying for the Olympics with top performances at the Test event at Marseilles (site of the 2024 Olympic sailing) and the 2023 Worlds in the Netherlands.
Her theme for the year? “I’ve been loving full-time training and campaigning,” Moroz says. “ You really need to just fall in love with the process and love the everyday grind.”
Ravi Parent plans to defend his A Cat and F18 titles in Europe this summer, but he’s also started sailing the foiling Moth dinghy, a singlehanded monohull that foils both upwind and down. His goal is “to upskill and grow my high-performance sailing knowledge,” he says, and he’s decided to enter the 150-boat Moth World Championship in England in June.
“Who knows what will happen?” he says. “You have to go into every regatta not having expectations ‘out of the park.’ You have to go and sail every day…taking every day, one at a time.”
This article was originally published in the May 2023 issue.
