PORTLAND – As Kevin Mahaney stood in a phone booth in Barcelona, Spain, he couldn’t help notice the sight around him.

On one side was Naim Suleymanoglu, the 4-foot-11 Turkish weightlifter known as Pocket Hercules. On the other side, was the Russian bear of a wrestler Aleksandr Karelin.

“I’m looking at these two specimens,” said Mahaney, the Bangor native and former Olympic sailor. “It was like being in a movie.

“It’s like the Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day.” You see everything around you is going on, and you’re surprised you’re part of it.”

Mahaney admits he doesn’t look back too much on his Olympic experiences from 1992, but sometimes he can’t help but marvel at being part of such an event.

“The biggest thing I look back at is sitting there with my children and watching it on TV and thinking it’s hard to believe that I was one of them,” said Mahaney, who was named the Rolex Yachtsman of the Year in 1992.

Mahaney never imagined being in the Olympics as a kid. The silver medal winner in the Soling class wasn’t even a sailor. He did some sailing as a kid in summer camp but never got involved in competitive sailing until going to Middlebury College.

“I kind of took up the passion, and I committed myself to doing it,” said Mahaney, who later sailed Young America in the 1995 America’s Cup campaign.

Still, the Olympics weren’t his goal, but when Mahaney does something he’s give it all he’s got. He was an accomplished skier and lacrosse player before becoming an Olympic sailor. Now he’s a national champion in snowboarding in his age group. He just recently raced a couple legs in the Tour de France.

“I just like to do things at a very high level,” said Mahaney. “When I’d do things, it was never a goal to be anything. I just enjoyed competing.”

It just so happened that the Soling boats he raced were an Olympic class. He quickly moved up the ranks.

He sailed in the 1988 Olympic trials and then put a new team together for 1992. Along with Florida’s Jim Brady and Texan Doug Kern, he won the Olympic trials in Florida, overcoming an early deficit to earn the lone berth in the Soling Class.

“The hardest thing about an Olympic team is qualifying for the Olympics,” he said. “They only take one boat. A lot of the best sailors in the world come from your country. So somebody else who finishes second could be on the podium.”

They had lost four straight races in the finals of the trials only to win six of the next seven races, including five straight, to win.

They had high expectations for Bar celona. They won the qualifying fleet racing and went 5-0 in the round robin match racing but lost in the best-of-three finals to Denmark’s Jesper Bank.

“It took me awhile to realize that we won a silver medal and didn’t lose a gold medal,” said Brady, now a business partner with Mahaney and whose wife won a bronze medal in the European Dinghy class in Barcelona. “For us the medal ceremony was a letdown.”

Though most Olympic sailing venues are far from the Olympic village, that wasn’t the case in Barcelona.

“We had the Prince (Albert of Monaco) sailing in our Olympic class,” said Mahaney. “So there was a huge focus on sailing. So it made it an extra special Olympics. We were the centerpiece of the Olympics.”

It also made for some tricky sailing conditions. After being the favorites for much of the competition, the finals were a best-of-three match race, and Bank won two straight.

“The final race was live TV and the winds weren’t very cooperative,” said Mahaney. “So there was a bit more luck involved than we’d hoped.

“Think of racing inside the Breakwater in Boston Harbor. You lose half the course and then you have all these big tall buildings. You could have a 15 knot puff and then the breeze dies and you’re sitting there flopping while the other guy has a 15 knot puff.”

Mahaney says he never really knew what to expect from the Olympics. The thing that struck him most was the camaraderie among the fellow athletes. He had breakfast with then No. 1 ranked tennis player Jim Courier, even letting him try on his medal, and constantly ran into other big name sports stars.

“There’s this mutual respect among the athletes,” he said. “You’d go into the dining hall with 2,000 other athletes and everyone would look at each other and be impressed. You may have been good in your sport, but you weren’t good in the other ones. That’s what made it fun. They’re looking at you like you’re special, and you’re looking at all those icons and thinking they’re special.”

Mahaney is now the CEO of The Erin Company and the Olympia Equity Investors.

What Mahaney’s Olympic experience demonstrates most, he says, is that anybody can achieve if they put their mind to it.

“Assume you can,” he said. “It just never occurred to me that I couldn’t do something. I just kept working at it. When you keep working at something, every step is just one more step. You’re not ever making that giant leap. If you assume you can’t, you’re never going to do it.”


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