RIO DE JANEIRO _ Caleb Paine grew up the son of an avid sailor and developed an early interest in the sport. He was playing AYSO soccer when one of the coaches recommended a learn-to-sail class on San Diego's Mission Bay. His parents signed him up. He was 7.
Briana Provancha had parents who didn't sail. But they had friends who were members at the Mission Bay Yacht Club and invited them on weekends. Briana liked to swim out to the dock with the slide and goof around in the water.
The club hosted youth regattas on Sundays, and one day the crewmate for a boy named Scott didn't show up and he needed a replacement. Briana shrugged. Sure, why not. All she had to do was sit in the boat, right?
She was hooked, returning every Sunday for the races. She enrolled in a learn-to-sail class at the yacht club. She was 8.
There were maybe 10 kids in the class, sailing tiny Sabot dinghies on Cookie Cove near the Bahia Resort, smiling, giggling, rounding buoys, trying not to crash into each other. "Controlled chaos," says Bridget Shear, the instructor who had fond memories of being in the class a decade earlier and slamming into the boat of "a cute 11-year-old boy."
One learn-to-sail class, two Olympians.
Paine and Provancha are at the Olympic regatta in different U.S. boats this week on Rio's (really, really polluted) Guanabara Bay. Paine sails in the single-handed Finn class and is in eighth place after two of 10 races. Provancha and crewmate Annie Haeger of East Troy, Wis., begin Wednesday in the two-person 470 class.
"Crazy," Paine says.
"They looked the exact same as they do now, only smaller," says Shear, who now works as a captain on private sailboats, often in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. "But I definitely knew from the get-go that these kids would go somewhere. You can tell the kids who have drive and commitment and want to carry on versus the kids who are just out there having fun."
Paine and Provancha continued their careers on similar arcs, both coming up through the Southwestern Yacht Club's junior program and then attending Point Loma High (which has a sailing team) a year apart and ultimately racing internationally.
Paine, 25, trained with Zach Railey, a 2008 silver medalist, ahead of the 2012 Olympics "to learn everything I could," then mounted his own campaign for Rio in the Finn for heavyweight sailors (he's 6-foot-3, 220 pounds).
And then found himself in Barcelona battling Railey for the lone spot on the U.S. Olympic team in the final regatta of the selection process. It involved cut-throat tactics and fouls and protests and jury decisions and agonizing weather delays. With Railey holding a slim points lead entering the final race, he got stuck on the left side of the course while Paine went right.
The wind was more favorable on the right, and Paine secured the Olympic berth.
"One of the craziest days of my life," he says. "The Olympics will be easy compared to what I had to go through to get there."
Provancha, 27, and Haeger had an easier qualification, winning the Rio test event last year. They have been sailing together since Boston College, but they first met a few years earlier at a junior regatta where they both qualified for the Volvo Youth Worlds.
"I'm a little more reserved and shy," Haeger says, "and Briana came waltzing up and said: 'Hi, I'm Briana. We're going to youth worlds together.' We got to become really good friends at the youth worlds, and ever since then we've been on the same path even though we didn't know it."
They're different, in personality and in path. Haeger grew up on this "tiny, little lake" in Wisconsin where five generations of her family have sailed, then was home schooled while traveling to competitions. Provancha fell into the sport by accident and grew up playing tennis.
"My mom didn't want my (younger) sister and me competing against each other," Provancha says, "so she made me play a division higher because we were so close in age. So I was 11 or 12 playing 13s, which was not going to go well and I'm competitive. At that point in time, I was doing both sports and I decided to sail full-time while my sister kept with the tennis.
"It worked out, because she got a scholarship in college."
And Briana got to the Olympics.
"She was the valedictorian of her high school simply because she willed herself to do it," Haeger says of Provancha. "When she puts her mind to something, she's going to get it and she's going to get it fairly and she's going to have it all mapped out. Her drive pushes me. We really are yin and yang. Her strengths are my weaknesses and vice versa."
One learn-to-sail class, two Olympians. Shear will watch the Rio regatta on TV, and smile.
"At that age, you're just trying to keep them from not hurting themselves, from not crashing into each other," Shear says. "But you always hope you can have a positive impact and they carry on and get to the top."
