Triplets, 17, Have Sights Set on the 2026 Winter Olympics. They’ve Been Training for It Since They Were 5 (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• New York Triplets Helaina, Henniyah and Henri Rivers IV are training to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy
• The 17-year-old siblings, who will turn 18 on Aug. 24, are competitive alpine skiers and newly minted Eagle Scouts
• “Without skiing, I don’t really have a whole purpose in life that separates me from other people, you know? Like, this is my one goal in life,” Henri IV tells PEOPLE via a call from Argentina
  

After becoming the first Black triplets to earn the Eagle Scout rank in the U.S., the Rivers triplets are eying an international achievement.

The 17-year-old siblings — Helaina, Henniyah and Henri Rivers IV of Long Island, N.Y. — are training hard in snowy Argentina to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics as alpine skiers representing Jamaica, where their mom is from.

“My mom came to the U.S. when she was young, so she obviously did not grow up skiing, but she learned how to ski when she met my dad,” Helaina tells PEOPLE of her Jamaican mom, Karen, and American dad, Henri, who are now both certified ski instructors and alpine race coaches.

“We grew up skiing, and we've been skiing ever since,” adds Helaina, who says their parents introduced them to snow sports at age 1, before the triplets started racing when they were 5 years old. “We’ve loved it.”

Born and raised for seven years in Brooklyn after they were born in August 2007, the triplets quickly discovered snow sports such as snowtubing, sledding, snowboarding and skiing thanks to their parents’ interests.

The trio eventually fell in love with alpine racing, becoming young competitive ski racers and members of the Windham Race Factory and training at Windham Mountain in the Catskill Mountains.

“We started out in the children’s learning center, learning how to ski, getting the skis underneath us and getting down the bunny slope,” Helaina recalls. “And then we progressed up to the Windham Race Factory and were on that team for a while. We started racing when we were 5.”

“We just kept moving up and up and up as we grew older and we've made lifelong friends with a part of that team as well,” she continues. “And that’s really what kicked started our racing career.”

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At 14, their training schedule turned into a six-day-a-week commitment at boarding schools that fostered their academic and alpine skiing endeavors.

“Without skiing, I don’t really have a whole purpose in life that separates me from other people, you know? Like, this is my one goal in life,” Henri IV tells PEOPLE during an exclusive phone interview from Argentina with his sister Helaina and father on the call. Henniyah wasn’t available at the time.

While the trio is working to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, two of them have already represented Jamaica at Youth Olympic Games in South Korea, in 2024, before graduating from high school in June 2025.

“We’ve been working on the plan for over almost 20 years,” says the triplets’ dad, who started skiing when he was 9. “It started before they were born. It could have all been derailed if they didn’t like snow, if they didn’t wanna ski, because I wasn’t gonna force them.”

“We’re almost to the point where they’re gonna start seeing their abilities exponentially increase,” he explains of their skiing prowess. “Right now, they’re decent skiers. They’re going to be so much better skiers and so much better racers in the next couple of years.”

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The triplets’ father continues, “They’re going to be phenomenal racers for years to come. And we’re just really happy that it went this way, you know? But what's best is that they’re great individuals. They really are. ... They've stuck to scouting. They became Eagle Scouts. They’ve all graduated from decent schools. They all got accepted to college. I’ve done my job. I really feel happy that I’ve done a good for them. So I’m really happy.”

For their service project that helped them achieve Eagle Scout rank, the triplets did three individual projects to beautify one area.

“My troop is based out of Bayshore, and we would also do meetings in Brightwaters as well, so I reached out to the mayor of the town hall and he told me that he has had this flagpole project overlooked for many years,” Helaina says. “I decided to replace the flagpole. It was a wooden flagpole that looked like it was about to topple over any second.”

“I replaced it with a 25 foot fiberglass pole so that it would withstand the weather, rain, all of that, and not deteriorate super fast,” she adds.

Explaining what her siblings did next, Helaina continues, “My sister installed paving stones around the flagpole and put in new cement for the pathway. And then my brother installed flower boxes, and he installed two benches that look out onto the street and the flagpole area.”

Read the original article on People