VAIRES-SUR-MARNE, France — There is no hiding what happened to the U.S. Olympic rowing team in Tokyo three years ago.
For the first time in 108 years, American rowers left the Olympics empty-handed. That was troubling enough, but it was especially hard for the women’s eight, one of the biggest Olympic sports of the 21st century.
The boat had won every major race from 2006 to 2016, a run that included every world championship and three consecutive gold medals. Now they and everyone wearing the stars and stripes went home empty-handed, with three years to get the ship back in order and seven to rebuild it for the Los Angeles Olympics.
At the end of the Olympic regatta on Saturday, the Americans could only draw one important lesson: recovery projects don’t just happen, especially when the report consists of the cold, hard arithmetic of an Olympic medal tally that every sport must deal with. These are numbers that now linger in the background of the clock ticking inexorably toward a 2028 deadline that seems to be looming very soon.
There were two medals this time around, with the men’s eights taking bronze on Saturday, two days after the men’s fours won gold. Better, yes, but not where they want to be with a once-in-a-generation chance to compete at an Olympic Games on home soil at the top of their list once the flame goes out in Paris on August 11.
All of the American athletes in Paris who haven’t yet decided to retire have had some part of their brain focused on 2028 for some time now. And there’s perhaps no better example of this than the hierarchy within American rowing, from the fundraisers to the athletes, who are determined to get this right again.
“I could be proud, but I’m Dutch,” said Josy Verdonkschot, who took over as USRowing’s high-performance chief in 2022. “If you really want to compete with the biggest teams, we have to improve, and that’s the fun part of the job. You can’t sit back, and if there’s no challenge, it’s not fun.”
True to his word, Verdonkschot refrained from patting himself on the back too hard after the men’s eight won the bronze medal. All medals, regardless of class, are important, of course. But the eight is the flagship of the rowing program and it was important to get back on the podium. They make movies and write best-sellers about these boats.
Still, he expressed a mixture of pride and regret. The goal had been two to four medals, he said. The Americans had met his minimum, but he is greedy.
“We could have done better,” said Verdonkschot.
Of course, he has a plan, both short-term and long-term. That plan includes everything from how the team and coaches will handle rowing at the collegiate and club level, to how we can help rowers keep working off the water so they can support their Olympic efforts, to building more training centers.
These are administrative details, however. Ultimately, if this reconstruction is to prove successful, it will be up to the rowers themselves to recreate the culture in which success breeds success. That also began shortly after Tokyo.
Great Britain, the Netherlands and the US will compete in the men’s eight final on Saturday. Bronze was progress for the US, but they will want more in LA (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
Friday morning, after narrowly missing out on the podium in fourth place in the women’s two-wheel category, Jessica Thoennes told a story about the months after Tokyo, when about a dozen women returning for this cycle pledged to support each other in whatever way they could. It could be showing up for an early-morning workout with someone who needed a boost, or just telling someone you were proud of them for being brave and trying something new.
“There’s a great quote,” Thoennes said. “Being kind is when you do something for someone who can’t do anything for you.”
That idea became the basis for where the U.S. Rowers wanted to take their program, she said. “When we sat down, we all thought, ‘We all want this. So we’re all buying it.'”
The ethos crossed gender boundaries.
Michelle Sechser, who reached the final but finished sixth in the lightweight double sculls, said she had done a lot of training sessions on the heavy ergometer with male rowers before Paris.
Every endurance sport has its training rut. Rowing is equal to all other sports. Spend a few minutes on a rowing machine and you’ll quickly understand why. Training buddies can help, especially when slumps, fatigue, and injuries cause things to go wrong.
“Progress is not always linear,” Secher said.
Meghan Musnicki, a 41-year-old veteran of the major championships of the 2010s, has seen her event, and women’s sports in general, become more competitive and deeper with each round.
“It’s incredible to be a part of it,” she said Saturday after finishing fifth. “That’s not to say it’s not soul-crushing to be there,” especially Saturday. Musnicki likely won’t be there for Los Angeles, even though she has come out of retirement and back in the boat twice.
On the other hand, the men’s eight was full of Olympic newcomers. Only Clark Dean was on the previous U.S. rowing team in Tokyo.
The pandemic made the run-up to those Games a bit of a drag, but Dean said that even taking that complication into account, this cycle was unlike anything he’d experienced before. Everyone was caught up in the pain of Tokyo.
“We’ve redlined the training in a way that I’ve never done before,” Dean said. “A lot of these guys have never done it like that before, they’ve pushed it to the edge of illness and injury, week in and week out.”
And that will happen more often, especially now that Verdonkschot is in charge.
He came to the US after building champions in both the Netherlands and Belgium over the past 20 years.
His first impression: a big country, lots of athletes and an extensive college system to train them.
Biggest obstacles to success: The country is so big and there are so many athletes that it’s nearly impossible to get everyone under one training program. And the college system can be a double-edged sword. He’s great for scouting prospects, but he can’t test them and he has limited access to them to train and develop them to world-class standards because, well, they’re busy going to college.
He has begun creating a development path with a set of standards so that all athletes, no matter where they compete or train, know what grades they need to achieve to make the national team. He is looking for a suitable high-altitude body of water, perhaps in Colorado or near Flagstaff, Arizona, to train, because that is what the best teams in the world do.
His main task, however, is to convince the rowers who competed in Paris to continue rowing for another four years, even if that means combining full-time, or almost full-time, work with training. The acceptance of remote work after the pandemic helps. Still, it’s not always the easiest argument to make to Ivy League graduates with high earning potential, although Saturday’s bronze medal certainly helped him.
“We’re definitely building toward something,” said Nick Rusher, a 2023 Yale graduate and member of the men’s eighth boat, whose mother and father are both Olympic rowing medalists. “We can win a lot of gold medals in L.A. on home soil.”
(Top photo of the U.S. men’s team celebrating their bronze medal on Saturday: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
