ITHACA, N.Y. -- The first thing sophomore Gilda Dondona remembers about sailing wasn't speed or spray — it was the feeling.

The wind on her skin. The whisper of it in her ear. The feel of it through her hair. The quiet rhythm of balance between sea and sail.

Dondona was five, growing up on the French Riviera, between the hills of Nice and the sea that almost touches Italy. Her afternoons were split between tennis courts and sails, between repetition and rhythm. On the last day of summer camp, her birthday, she was allowed to sail alone.

"I just felt so free," she said. "The wind, the water - I felt connected to it. I told my parents I wanted to keep sailing, and I never stopped."

That decision shaped nearly everything that followed. 

The only child of an architect and a literature teacher, Dondona built her own map: school and sea, side by side, never one without the other.

She became French national champion in the ILCA 4, a youth class boat that rewards precision and poise. But as she grew, the boat didn't - her ambition did. The sails got bigger, the competition more intense, and through all of it an Olympic dream was born. That dream became less about medals and more about mastering that impossible stillness - the moment when wind, water and instinct are one.

For Dondona, speed never came from strength alone. It came from attention, from listening - a connection that became her edge. Where others read the water, she listened to it. Her coach once gave her a lesson she never forgot — one that stripped sight away to sharpen every other sense. She trained at a young age while wearing a mask that covered her eyes, allowing her to be fully connected to her surroundings without seeing them. 

"He wanted me to feel the wind on my skin," Dondona said. "I hear the wind in my ear, when my head is oriented correctly it makes this sound, and that means everything is just perfectly positioned. It's like an equilibrium — if you move even a millimeter, you break something important."

"I actually grew up sailing without looking," she said.

Dondona enrolled at Cornell as an academic admit, not a recruited student-athlete. "I didn't think I would get in," she said. "When I saw the confetti on my screen, I thought it was a dream." A week later, she wrote to the Big Red coaching staff to let them know she was coming. By the time preseason ended, she had earned her place on the roster — and within weeks, she was a conference champion, unmistakably at the helm.

Maybe that's why she adapted so quickly - calm under pressure, comfortable in motion. What she calls equilibrium, others see as poise.

Her sense of equilibrium still defines her - on the water, in the classroom, even across an ocean 4,700 miles from home. Now a sophomore studying environmental engineering at Cornell, Dondona is one of the Big Red's top sailors and a two-time MAISA singlehanded champion. She will compete again for a national title beginning on Saturday in Norfolk, Va. - one year removed from finishing as national runner-up to Harvard Olympian Sophia Montgomery. Seven of the top 10 finishers from a year ago return to compete, making it one of the most accomplished fields ever.

When Dondona arrived in Ithaca, her English lagged behind her instincts. Already fluent in French and Italian, with family over both borders, her English was still a work in progress. A semester exchange with a family in San Francisco as a high schooler where she sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge had brought her along, but not to a place she was completely comfortable. English was still new. The wind and the water were not. Before she could speak easily with teammates, she connected with them by sailing - by showing, not saying, that she belonged.

Now she's fluent in all of it: language, balance, rhythm, control. She's learning to share the space too, adjusting to the give-and-take of doublehanded boats and the energy of a collegiate team.

"It was really hard at first," she said. "I'd always been quiet on the water. Now I had to talk about how the boat felt, what the wind was doing. But it's taught me to trust people, to share something that used to be only mine.

While it's increasingly rare that she trails another boat, she still embraces the chase — of light, of balance, of rhythm. When she has that, the results have taken care of themself.

She likes the quiet — the way the world slows when she's alone on the water. Sailing, she says, made her that way.

"It's really easy to look at what's coming to you and react to it, but it's a lot more efficient to feel it."

In the end, that's what she's chasing - not a finish line, but a feeling. The same one she found as a five-year-old in Nice, when the boat, the wind, a little girl and the water moved together - perfectly balanced.