Paul Foerster - When Paul was nine years old, his family relocated from Alice, Texas, to the Gulf Coast town of Corpus Christi.  Without that move, his father might never have read a sailing magazine he picked up while sitting in the waiting room of the dentist’s office.  Inspired, Paul’s father bought both a boat (a 10’ Styrofoam boat with one sail called the Sunflower) and a learn-to-sail book, introducing his family to their new sport.

In high school, Paul ran track and played both baseball and basketball.  Going to the Olympics had been a dream of his since he was 13, with basketball the way he wanted to go – until he realized his 5’ 8” height would work against him.  But when he was 19, Paul got schooled in sailboat racing when J/24 class champion Bill Allen was recruited to skipper the family’s boat.  When he entered the University of Texas a year later (1983) as the unknown who had never participated in a sailing program, he caught the school’s sailing team – filled with veterans of yacht club junior programs – by surprise.  Paul didn’t remain an unknown for long – by the time he graduated from UT in 1987 he had received All-American honors from ICSA (then ICYRA) three times.

A year later, Paul’s dream of competing in the Olympics was realized.  He sailed a Flying Dutchman in the 1988 Olympics in Korea, finishing 11th.  Sailing with a new crew, Paul won two FD World Championships (1991 and 1992) and then his first Olympic Medal – a Silver – at the Summer Games in Barcelona.  He continued to race J/24s and J/22s, picking up more championship titles, including a gold medal at the 1995 Pan Am Games in J/24 match racing, but the FD had been dropped from Olympic competition, and so he watched the 1996 Summer Games on TV. 

Missing the competition motivated his move to the 470, and four years later Paul once again stood on the podium to collect his second Olympic Silver Medal.  After the Sydney Olympics, with no plans to sail again, it appeared that it was time for career and family until he got a call from Kevin Burnham.  The team of veterans, who at that point had been out of the 470 a couple of years, were initially surprised at how well they did against teams who had been sailing and training full time.  Last fall they dominated the Olympic Team Trials allowing Paul to go back and forth between racing in Houston and his home in Dallas to be with wife Carrie and first child, Luke, who was born three days before the Trials began.  Asked if it was hard to concentrate on the regatta and the baby, the sailor who says he leaves the results to God replied:  "Well, Kevin reminded me when I needed to concentrate on sailing, and when I was with my family I didn't think about sailing at all.  It was perfect." 

 

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