When the 2024 Paris Olympics get underway in just over a week, a sailor who honed his chops on the bristling winds of the San Francisco Bay is hoping to rocket his team onto the podium.
It helps that in addition to spending the majority of his life sailing, Hans Henken’s credentials also include a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in aeronautics engineering from Stanford, where he also competed on the varsity sailing team.
Though wind is the engine of the sailing vessels Henken navigates, a little technical know-how could come in handy amid the notoriously harsh winds of the French sailing venue Marseille.
“I learned how to design airplane wings,” said Henken. “And a sailboat is basically an airplane with half an airplane wing that’s sticking up in the air off the boat.”
Henken’s first dream as a five-year-old was to be an astronaut, which was supplanted shortly after his mother introduced him to sailing when he was 6 years old. From then on, another goal became his North Star.
“As a kid all I’ve ever wanted to do — my biggest goal was to compete in the Olympic Games,” Henken said by virtual call from his current home in Barcelona. “To be able to say I accomplished that this summer is a huge milestone in my life.”
It’s a milestone more than a decade in the making — for the last 15 years Henken campaigned to compete in the Olympics for the U.S. Sailing Team, serving as an alternate in Rio and missing out on the Tokyo Olympics. After finally qualifying for the Paris Olympics, he lived in San Francisco’s Castro District and trained in the San Francisco Bay, with the kind of punishing winds and currents that will add salt to any sailor.
“Being able to sail in those conditions and kind of raise your game,” Henken said. “makes sailing in lighter air so much easier.”
Henken competes in the two-handed, high performance skiffs known as 49er Class with teammate Ian Barrows. Henken’s also raced in the high power SailGP Championships as a flight controller where his engineering background helped him navigate rapidly evolving wind patterns.
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“Knowing and understand the engineering behind that,” Henken said. “And being able to apply that to sailing has been a big competitive advantage for me.”
Though Henken was born near San Diego, he spent most of his life in the Bay Area, training in the bay, attending Stanford — he even proposed to his wife on Angel Island.
“It feels so special to be able to say ‘I’m part of there,'" he said. “I train there and I’ve competed and trained there almost my entire life.”
For the last six months, Henken has trained in Marseille, while living in Barcelona with his wife Helena Scutt, an Olympic sailor and current engineer for America’s Cup challenger, America Magic.
His trip to the Paris Olympics is a melding of multiple dreams and a lifetime of pursuits, from sailing to learning to design rocket engines. Pretty much every lesson he’s ever learned is on the table when he straps himself into his craft and rides the wind.
“It’s going to be challenging conditions every single day,” Henken said. “And it’ll require every tool in the toolbox to be able to figure out how to get yourself onto that podium.”
