USRowing is pleased to announce that Olympic women's single sculler Dr. Gevvie Stone and Paralympic men's single sculler Blake Haxton have been selected the 2016 USRowing Female and Male Athletes of the Year.
Voting for the awards is done by the athletes and coaches of the senior national teams, and both Stone and Haxton will be honored at the 2016 Golden Oars Dinner on Nov. 17 at the New York Athletic Club in New York City.
Stone, rowing in her second Olympic Games, won the silver medal in her event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Newton, Mass. native is a five-time senior national team athlete. After finishing seventh in London at the 2012 Olympics, Stone took a year off from rowing to complete medical school at Tufts University, then returned to competition in 2014 and began preparing for Rio, steadily climbing up through the ranks of the best female scullers in the world.
She won silver and bronze World Rowing Cup medals in 2015 and then finished fourth and qualified the boat class for Rio at the world championships. This year, Stone won silver at World Rowing Cup II and carried that momentum to the Olympic podium in August.
"It's amazing," she said. "To be chosen for an award by fellow athletes and coaches is just the most flattering recognition I can imagine. The women and coaches on the team understand what it takes to make the Olympics and what it takes to race the single," Stone said of the award.
"To have their support and commendation carries a lot of meaning. This award is all part of the same story," she said. "You can't arrange them in any way, because they all fit into the same puzzle, which is my love for rowing and my dedication to the sport."
Read about the announcement and Stone's reaction here.
Men's arms and shoulders sculler Blake Haxton, of Columbus, Ohio, lost both legs after contracting necrotizing fasciitis, or "flesh-eating disease," while a senior in high school. He began rowing the para single after he was lured back to the sport by the coaches and his friends at Upper Arlington Crew, where he had rowed scholastically.
Just three years into his career as a Paralympic single sculler, Haxton has made the finals in every international event in which he has competed. He finished fourth at his first world championships in 2014, finished fifth and qualified his boat class for the Paralympic Games at the 2015 World Rowing Championships and then finished fourth, just out of the medals, in Rio.
"I don't have anything to compare this to," Haxton said. "I try and analogize everything and try to put things into context in order to know what to feel or think about something, and I am struggling here, because I don't have a context," he said.
"I never thought that, given a list of every athlete on the Olympic and Paralympic teams, that they would vote for me," he said. "It's just kind of unbelievable that the guys would see this list of athletes, and that I would come to mind, and they would vote for me.
"This is the biggest honor I have ever gotten athletically, or in anything for that matter, when I think of it. This is as big as it has ever been for me."