Four years of work. Three World Rowing Championships. Amazing victories, stunning defeats, coaching changes, new faces, returning athletes, endless days of training, dreams realized and dreams crushed.
These are the components of an Olympic quadrennial and the United States rowing team has experienced it all.
And now, in just a few days, the focus of all this effort will be put to the ultimate test when the 2012 Olympic Games in London begin for the 12 crews that will compete on the rowing venue in Eton, England on July 28.
For those watching back in the States, this Olympics will have a new racing format that will feature four days of finals and hours of live television broadcasting on NBC.
Of the 14 boat classes that will compete in Eton, the United States will have 12 boats entered. Only the men’s double sculls and lightweight men’s double sculls will be missing from the U.S. contingent.
In all, 44 rowing athletes and their accompanying coaches and staff comprise the largest team of athletes to cross the Atlantic in search of glory. Among the crews entered, one is favored to win, and several others are expected to be legitimate medal contenders.
As any coach will say, however, this is the Olympic Games. Every one of them is different. And anything can happen on race day.
But for now, the work of the past four years is done and the anticipation is building.
“It’s exciting and it’s fun,” said head women’s coach Tom Terhaar. “You spend so much time in our sport waiting to get down to this point and now we’ll figure out who’s got the Olympic medals and who doesn’t. It’s exciting.”
The U.S. will race six crews of women, including the eight, the quad, the double, the pair, the lightweight double and the single.
On the men’s side, there will be an equal number of crews rowing including the eight, the four, the quad, the lightweight four, the pair and the single.
It has been an intense 10 months for the men who were forced for the first time to take the eight to the last chance Olympic Qualification Regatta to gain a spot in London after failing to qualify at the 2011 World Rowing Championships. But that’s behind them now. They did what had to be done in Lucerne in May, and are now putting the final strokes in before racing.
“We seem to be improving steadily,” said men’s eight coach Mike Teti. “After the qualifier, we went back and did a lot of work in fours. We’re just trying to get more comfortable with the race cadence and strategy and the times seem to be getting better.”
If there is one crew that should be favored to win, it’s the U.S. women’s eight.
The eight is the defending Olympic and six-time world champion. Every year, there is a different lineup, but no matter who Terhaar puts in the boat, they have always found a way to win. At the second 2012 World Rowing Cup in Lucerne, Switzerland in May, the U.S. won gold and set a world best time of 5:54.17, beating the time of 5:55.50 set by the U.S. in 2006.
Still, after returning to the United States, Terhaar put his crew back into selection and a new lineup emerged that included coxswain Mary Whipple (Orangevale, Calif.), Caryn Davies (Ithaca, N.Y.), Caroline Lind (Greensboro, N.C.), Eleanor Logan (Boothbay Harbor, Maine), Meghan Musnicki (Naples, N.Y.), Taylor Ritzel (Larkspur, Colo.), Erin Cafaro (Modesto, Calif.), Esther Lofgren (Newport Beach, Calif.) and Susan Francia (Abington, Pa.).
Six athletes – Whipple, Davies, Lind, Logan, Francia and Cafaro – return from the crew that won gold at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Whipple and Davies are the senior members of the crew, and are entering their third Olympics, having won silver in Athens in 2004.
Following the eight selection, Terhaar and his staff focused on the women’s quad, one of three boats that qualified for London last summer on Lake Bled, and named Adrienne Martelli (University Place, Wash.), Kara Kohler (Clayton, Calif.), Megan Kalmoe (St. Croix Falls, Wis.) and Natalie Dell (Clearville, Pa.) to that crew.
For Terhaar, and for the athletes, the selection process was grueling and the competition fierce.
“It was definitely the most talented overall group we’ve had, that I’ve had,” Terhaar said. “The depth from top to bottom was better than in the past. There were athletes that didn’t make the team that would have had a good chance to make it four years ago. There is just so much depth.”
Terhaar, now going on his third Olympics, is wise enough to know that any boosting or predicting of possible results will just end up being posted on an opponents blackboard as motivation. He is confident in his team. But he is also keenly aware of the size of the stage and what has happened there before.
His 2004 eight was a favorite to win and the hype around them was constant. No one told the Romanian women the U.S. was going to win, least of all Terhaar. But if the Romanians were listening, they were not paying attention.
That was Whipple’s first Olympics and in an interview last year, she recounted what that race was like.
“I loved it because I didn’t care who our competition was,” she said. “I just knew we were going to put up a good fight and I think we wanted to never give up and never back down. It was kind of like youthful feistiness.”
“That definitely was the right tone because when we were coming in second in Athens, it could have easily unraveled even more when we didn’t find ourselves going for gold as the race progressed,” she said. “The Romanians just kept pushing out, pushing out, but we fought the whole entire way because we had to, because the Dutch were storming. I was really proud of that.”
Davies was also in that boat and with the returning veterans from the Beijing eight, Terhaar knows he has solid leadership going to London. Still, as he says, every Olympics is different.
“Really, you’ve got to race. If you look at Canada, they actually have a few people going for their third Olympics. Their coxswain has been to I don’t know how many. It’s just one race and if you’re not ready to go, it won’t matter that much. It does give me some confidence, I won’t say that it’s nothing, but it only helps if you do something with it.
“The Olympics are always different than the world championships, always, and it’s always closer than you think,” Terhaar said. “I always tell (the crews), it’s going to be tight and it’s going to be close. In 2004, there were six boats dead level at the thousand and we had no races leading up to it that looked like that.”
The Canadians have been chasing the U.S. women for the last two years. In Lucerne in 2011, and again on Lake Bled, the Canadian eight led in the early parts of the races. The U.S. caught and passed them, but the margin of victory was minuscule. In May, Canada finished just 0.03 seconds behind the U.S. in the world cup final.
“(This Olympics), it could be Great Britain, it could be the Dutch, it could be Canada, it could be Romania,” Terhaar said. “Historically, Romania, well we know what they’ve got. They’ve won an Olympic medal every year that it’s been held and they have won three.”
The facts are the Romanian women’s eight has won an Olympic medal every Games since 1980. Their total count is eight: three gold, three silver and two bronze.
“I think if you start to pinpoint and say, ‘Hey, it’s this boat we have to beat, or that boat,’ you’re in trouble,” Terhaar said. “I try not to even go there. We’ll do what we can do. You never know who is going to show up. There are only a couple of crews that won’t be in the medal hunt, but I would say there are five that are going to be in the hunt for sure.”
While the women’s eight is going to be the boat to watch, the women’s quad is nothing to overlook. With a 2011 silver-medal win in the books, the U.S. entered two quads in Lucerne and came away with a bronze medal. The crew has experience and strength.
Kalmoe, who finished fifth in the double sculls in Beijing, was in the quad with Martelli and Dell at the 2011 World Rowing Championships. Kohler was a member of the women’s four that won gold in Bled, and Martelli and Dell were in the quad that took home the bronze medal from Lucerne.
The U.S. has finished fifth in all three past Olympics. But like in the eight, history says it’s going to be a battle to medal.
China won in Beijing. Germany, however, is the unquestioned power. Having medaled the last 21 consecutive years, they have three Olympic victories and a total of 13 world titles in the books, including 2011.
If there is going to be a Cinderella story for the women in London, it will come from the women’s pair. For the past two years, Amanda Polk (Pittsburgh, Pa.) and Jamie Redman (Spokane, Wash) have been in the eight that won two world titles and set the world best time in Lucerne.
They were the last pair cut from the eight and were projected to win in the pair at trials last month. After jumping out to a two-boat lead by the 1,000-meter mark, they were overtaken and defeated by Sarah Zelenka (Itasca, Ill.) and Sara Hendershot (West Simsbury, Conn.), who claimed their place on the Olympic squad.
Hendershot and Zelenka have nothing to lose going into London as Olympic rookies who were not even among the women taken to the Lucerne regatta.
They will have no easy time in London, as the defending world champions, New Zealand’s Juliette Haigh and Rebecca Scown and Great Britain’s Helen Glover and Heather Stanning are expected to be in the field. The two crews finished so close together in Bled, the race was decided on the final stroke.
Like the pair, the women’s double is certainly a boat to watch. Having finished third at trials, five-time national team athlete Sarah Trowbridge (Guilford, Conn.) and 2008 Olympian Margot Shumway (Westlake, Ohio), who were both cut from the training center camps, were awarded a roll-down berth to the team when the top two finishers, both U.S. training center crews, declined the bid at trials in April.
They accepted the bid and then won the qualification regatta, regaining the two seats lost when the boat did not qualify on Lake Bled last summer.
In lightweight women’s double, Julie Nichols (Livermore, Calif.) has been a fixture on the United States women’s team since 2003. The 2008-Olympic alternate in Beijing has two world championship medals including bronze in the lightweight quad in 2004 and silver in the lightweight double in 2005.
She teamed up in 2011 with Kristin Hedstrom (Concord, Mass.), who was in the silver-medal winning lightweight women’s quad in 2010. After winning National Selection Regatta #2, Nichols and Hedstrom took the 2011 Overall Rowing World Cup and then finished fourth on Lake Bled to qualify the boat.
The pair returned this year to again win the selection regatta and earn a chance to compete for an automatic bid to the Olympic team. They did not let the chance slip past and finished in fourth place in Lucerne and were named to the team.
As always, the U.S. will have to sort through a fast and very experienced field of athletes to have a chance in the women’s single.
In the 38 years that women have been included in the world championships, the U.S. has medaled only eight times. The good news is U.S. women have medaled in four Olympics since they were included in the Olympics in 1976. Michelle Guerette was the most recent to medal, having won silver in 2008.
The task this year is up to Gevvie Stone (Newton, Mass.).
Having failed to qualify the boat in her first world championships in 2011, Stone won the 2012 Non-Qualified Small Boat Trials in April. Stone, who finished 11th on Lake Bled last summer, finished third in the Olympic Qualification Regatta in May, earning the right to represent the United States this coming week.
For the men, there are no outright favorites. Certainly there are some encouraging signs in the eight. After wining the Olympic qualifier, Teti has been testing lineups, and rigging, and race strategy to maximize the U.S. chances.
If there is a coach capable of taking a boat to the podium after such a disastrous 2011, it is Teti. He has an Olympic gold medal and an Olympic bronze medal on his shelf and has coached the men’s eight to nine world titles, including three consecutive victories between 1997 and 1999.
Like Terhaar, Teti stays away from bold predictions. But he is, and always has been, honest about his crews’ chances.
“I don’t really know how we’ll do,” he said. “If we were consistently rowing under five-twenty, I would say we have a good shot at winning. We’re not doing that though so I really don’t know.
“And just the fact that we haven’t raced any of the other crews head-to-head, I would only be speculating. The way it’s shaping up in the eights race, it seems as though Germany clearly is on top and then comes everybody else,” he said.
“Most of these guys have all beaten each other between Canada and Britain and Poland, Australia, Holland. It just seems like they are all right there. Right now we’re just trying to get a little bit better.
“They’re a good group,” he said of his crew. “There are seven engineers in the boat, so they’re pretty methodical and focused. It’s an easy group to work with. We have a lot of discussions and everyone has input. So we’re getting better.”
The men’s four is also a boat that should contend for a medal. The crew of Scott Gault (Piedmont, Calif.), Charlie Cole (New Canaan, Conn.), Henrik Rummel (Pittsford, N.Y.) and Glenn Ochal (Philadelphia, Pa.) has experience and power.
Gault, is a returning 2008 Olympian and finished fifth in men’s quadruple sculls in Beijing. He and Cole were members of the men’s four that qualified the boat for London with its fourth-place finish at the 2011 World Rowing Championships. Rummel competed in the men’s eight and Ochal in the men’s quadruple sculls at last year’s world championships.
"We have been training in this combination for a little while, but to be named to the Olympic team is a huge honor and one we are very excited about,” said Cole, a nine-time national team member and Yale University alum, upon being named to the team.
The four did not make the final in Beijing and fell in performance at the 2009 World Rowing Championships, finishing 13th. The past two years, however, has seen significant improvement with a fifth place finish in 2010 and fourth in 2011.
Great Britain has been the dominant boat in the event, winning in Beijing and in two of the last three world championships.
Because of the selection process for the eight and some athlete injuries, both the four and the quad were selected late, and did not have an opportunity to be tested in Lucerne at the World Rowing Cup.
Still, head men’s coach Tim McLaren is confident that the lineups are solid and better than those featured last summer in Slovenia.
“None of the crews have had a depth of international racing this year for a variety of reasons, some injuries and some selection crews that went on for a while. The impact of qualifying and not qualifying, all of these things factor.
“I look forward to getting into some good racing and I think we’ll give a good account of ourselves. It’s hard for us to make any brave predictions without a lot of track record this year. But we’ve put in a lot of work,” McLaren said.
The men’s quad is a completely new lineup from the one that qualified the boat in Bled last summer. Named to the crew were Alex Osborne (Sherman Oaks, Calif.), Peter Graves (Cincinnati, Ohio), Elliot Hovey (Manchester-By-The-Sea, Mass.) and Wes Piermarini (West Brookfield, Mass.).
Hovey and Piermarini return from the Beijing double that finished 13th at the 2008 Olympic Games. Graves competed in the men’s double at last year’s world championships, while Osborne was in the men’s eight that finished eighth.
“The nature of selection is you have people who make their own luck a little and sometimes it’s out of the hands of the coaches a bit. In the end, it’s the sum of the parts,” McLaren said. “We’re getting ourselves fit and the crews are different than last year, but we think they are a little better.”
Over the last four years, the men’s quad has struggled. It finished fifth in Beijing, but followed that final appearance with 12th place in 2009, and eighth in both 2010 and 2011. Poland won in Beijing and again in 2009, while Australia has reached the podium the past three years, winning on Lake Bled.
The lightweight men’s four is a boat that has also had a hard four years. It finished 11th in Beijing, 12th in 2009, 10th in 2010 and 13th at Lake Bled, failing to qualify.
Under USRowing Training Center - Oklahoma City head coach Bryan Volpenhein, an intensive selection camp produced the lineup of Robin Prendes (Miami, Fla.), Nick LaCava (Weston, Conn.), Will Newell (Weston, Mass.) and Anthony Fahden (Lafayette, Calif.).
The four went to the Lucerne Olympic Qualification Regatta and not only earned a place in the London lineup, but won the event, pushing through the field and holding back a late surge by the Dutch to win by 0.14 seconds.
“They’re doing well,” Volpenhein said last month. “I think they are starting to come back up from the qualifier. We had some down time, and I think they just had to recover mentally and physically from that. Now they’re getting back on form and putting up some decent times, stuff that we had been doing before the qualifier. So we’re right back on track.”
Denmark is the defending Olympic champion, and Poland was second in Beijing. Australia won on Lake Bled, and was second in 2010 behind winner Great Britain.
Volpenhein is one of the most decorated rowers in U.S. history. The three-time Olympian stroked the men’s eight to a gold medal in Athens and a bronze in Beijing, and he knows what his crew is facing.
“For us, it’s everybody. When we look across we just think that everybody is a threat. It’s such a tight field. If you’re a couple of seconds off the lead you could be at the back of the B final or you could not make the B final. Or, you could make up those couple of seconds and be in the A final.”
For the men’s pair, the crew of Silas Stafford (Santa Rosa, Calif.) and Tom Peszek (Farmington Hills, Mich.) will have some very powerful and accomplished boats to work through if they want to contend. The last pair cut from the eight camp, Stafford and Peszek won at the 2012 Olympic Trials – Rowing last month to secure their seats in London.
Peszek helped qualify the boat at the World Rowing Championships in Bled with a ninth-place finish, while Stafford was in the four that finished fifth in 2010. Leading the list of favored winners should be the three-time world champions, Eric Murray and Hamish Bond of New Zealand and the crews from Great Britain and Australia.
The U.S. reached the final in Beijing, finishing sixth. While Australia won, New Zealand was third. Murray and Hamish have won the last three world titles and were chased down the course every time by second place Great Britain.
Finally, 2008 Olympian Ken Jurkowski (New Fairfield, Conn.) will take another shot at one of the most competitive rowing events in the Olympic Games, the men’s single sculls. This is an event that has seen foreign crews dominate the Olympic field since 1956.
While the U.S. took nine Olympic medals between 1904 and 1956, the last American to win an Olympic gold medal in the event was Philadelphia’s John B. Kelly, Sr. in 1920. Americans won another eight world championship medals, including two gold, but the last to win a world title was Jamie Koven in 1997.
Norway’s, Olaf Tufte is the defending Olympic champion, however, since 2008, three men have shared the podium, never once finishing in the same order, including New Zealand’s Mahe Drysdale, Ondrej Synek from the Czech Republic and Great Britain’s Alan Campbell.
Drysdale won in 2011 and 2009, Synek won in 2010 and was third in 2009, while Campbell was second in 2009 and third in both 2010 and 2011.
Jurkowski qualified the boat on Lake Bled last summer, followed that with a win at the National Selection Regatta #1 this past spring, and then won the Olympic Trials in the event to secure his place in London.
He has years of experience to draw on. He finished 11th in 2008, and rowed the last two world championships for the U.S., finishing 11th last year and 12th in 2010.
“It’s definitely a long journey,” he said after winning at trials. “There’s a lot of steps to take and the biggest key is working hard every day and getting the most you can out of every stroke you take.”
Comparing his 2008 quest to this year, Jurkowski said it was a much different experience.
“The work that went into them is significant, obviously, but the lead up is very different and the experience shapes how that goes. It’s hard really to compare year-to-year even, every year is different and you learn new things and you try them,” he said.
“Yes, I’m very excited to be competing and I’ll do everything I can to give my best effort for the Olympics.”
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