Olympic Sailing: Buckingham on Rio shuttle

Ten days before Charlie Buckingham planned to fly to Rio de Janeiro, he had just made it back to Newport Beach from Rio.

Newport Beach is home for Buckingham and Newport Beach is where he could reset, recharge and recover before venturing back to Rio at the end of the month to compete in the Olympics.

“I’m a little jet-lagged,” Buckingham said on Tuesday, the day he returned from Rio after taking an eight-hour overnight flight to Miami, then waiting two hours for his next flight, a five-hour trip to Los Angeles. “This is the last mental break for me before the Olympics.”

Traveling to and from Rio isn’t new to Buckingham. Competing in the Olympic is, though.

For the last four years, Buckingham said he has been making trips to Rio to train for this opportunity and to represent the U.S. in sailing. He made the team in April, qualifying in the Laser class event.

Reaching the Olympics as an American in sailing is unlike racing on land. The top three in each event in track and field move on.

Only one American earns the spot in the single-handed racing dinghy, and it went to Buckingham, a former Newport Harbor High standout.

Buckingham knows how difficult it is to make it in his sailing event. He has been to the Olympics before — the 2012 London Games — but as a coach. When he didn’t qualify back then with the U.S., Buckingham coached someone from another country, with whom he had trained with for London.

It was one thing for Buckingham to coach in the Olympics and it will be another for him to compete in the Olympics.

Buckingham will get to test the waters himself this time.

The sailor Buckingham coached in the last Olympics, Cy Thompson of the Virgin Islands, will be there as well next month, when the Laser event takes place in Rio’s Guanabara Bay from Aug. 8-15. There has been a lot of talk about the bay’s polluted waters, and Buckingham is well aware of the conditions.

“The situation isn’t perfect,” Buckingham said. “The water is dirty and there’s a lot of debris in the water. I’m not super worried. It won’t be a deciding factor in the competition.”

Pollution isn’t the only thing Buckingham and the rest of the Olympic field have to navigate through in the water. Buckingham said the site of the event is a very difficult place to sail because of the shifting winds and currents.

Buckingham hopes experience pays off in Rio. His Olympic goal is to become the first American to medal in the Laser, an event that debuted in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

For 12 days in July, Buckingham said he trained in Rio for three-to-four hours a day and had practice races with other Olympians. The favorites, Buckingham said, in the Laser are Brazil’s Robert Scheidt, who won gold in the event at the Athens Games in 2004 and in Atlanta in 1996, and silver in Sydney in 2000, and Great Britain’s Nick Thompson, who in May won a second straight Laser World Championship.

Other than those two sailors, Buckingham said there are 13 others who can claim gold, including him. Buckingham said his parents, Jim and Mary, and three sisters, Mary, Elizabeth and Sarah, are coming to Rio to watch him perform.

Jim, a former sailor at Cal, is the one who introduced sailing to his son when he was 5. Three years later, Buckingham learned how to sail on his own at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club.

“All of my sisters sailed and all were quite good,” Buckingham said. “But they chose to play volleyball when they went to Newport Harbor.”

Buckingham won’t be the only Newport Harbor alumnus vying for gold in Rio.

Buckingham went to high school with Kaleigh Gilchrist, who’s now a member of the U.S. Olympic women’s water polo team.

“We were on the surf team at Newport Harbor,” said Buckingham, who graduated from Newport Harbor in 2007, three years ahead of Gilchrist. “It’s cool that two people on the same surf team ended up where we did.”

Don’t expect Buckingham to bring out his surfboard while in Newport Beach. Surfing is also one of his favorite sports, but with so much on the line in Rio, he can’t afford an injury.

The other Newport Harbor athlete going to Rio is April Ross. She won a silver medal for the U. S. in women’s beach volleyball in 2012. Eight months ago, Buckingham said he met Ross for the first time.

“We did a United Airlines event in LAX,” said Buckingham, who is all too familiar with that airport.