Grant Janov '24

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To say that Grant Janov '24 is highly motivated to achieve a lofty goal is an understatement. Janov, who would ordinarily have been a member of the UCLA Class of 2025, has completed his undergraduate education early, with a major in gender studies and a minor in classical civilization, in order to begin a full-time Olympic campaign for the 2028 Games in sailing, in a class called the 49er.

Here, in his own words, is his story:

In 2028, the World’s attention will turn to Los Angeles for the Olympic Games, and I am to be competing on home waters in the sport of sailing. Throughout my time at UCLA I have been planning, preparing and training to launch a “campaign” for the 2028 Olympic Games, going as far as to accelerate my academic timeline to graduate in three years to align with the four-year Olympic “quadrennium.”
Before you imagine me sipping champagne on a yacht, and then taking the helicopter into the island for some lunch, allow me to paint a picture of the realities of elite sailboat racing:

• 5 a.m. gym sessions in Culver City before heading off to 8 a.m. classes in Bunche Hall. I don’t like Bunche.
• Sitting in a Polish emergency room, understanding exactly zero words of Polish, with your kid-brother, who broke his foot getting hung in the air by his ankle after a capsize.
• Lugging six heavy bags full of gear up and down seven flights of stairs because the budget AirBnB didn’t have an elevator.
• Driving from L.A. to Nova Scotia with a trailer on a hitch and a boat on the roof. It was a 3,000 mile drive; we had to do it in four days. It cost our truck its transmission, and the trailer its axle.

With those experiences in mind, sailboat racing at the Olympic level is far from what it sounds like. But regardless of the difficulties, it is something that my brother and I have loved doing since we were young, and now we are excited to have the opportunity to strive for excellence in our field.
Our Olympic endeavor is already four years in the making, as we started creating our passion in the youth version of our boat, the 29er. With some setbacks because of COVID-19, we aged out of that boat, and began working in the women’s version of our boat, the 49er FX. It was around this time that I was admitted to UCLA, and Jordan and I were set on reaching the world-class level in sailing, so it was determined that I had to complete my education at UCLA in three years to allow us the full four years of full-time sailing to prepare for the 2028 Olympic Games.

In the last three years the drive for said excellence has only gotten larger, and so has my body. I have gained 35 pounds (while happily maintaining my size 30 waist) and can now lift over 400 pounds on any given day. I’ve spent the last three years training five days a week in the gym, and when not working out or doing school, I was traveling around the country to work with high-level professional sailing teams in fleets like the Melges 24, J70 and Etchells. After a typical day of racing with a pro team, which started with diving the boat at 8 a.m. and wrapping up at 6 p.m., I would spend my evenings in a hotel room writing papers analyzing intersectional social issues that appear throughout history. Then I’d wake up at 5:30 the next morning and do it all over again, excited to learn from the idols that I race against.