U-23 World Championships

Finding Gold in Amsterdam:  the 2005 U-23 World Championships

The World Champion USA 4- on the medal stand in Amsterdam after securing the gold in the 2005 U-23 World Championships.  France is to the left (silver) and Belarus is to the right (bronze).  The US, left to right:  Erin Cafaro, Megan Kalmoe, Catherine Starr, Stesha Carle.  Vian Cafaro photo.

By Megan Kalmoe

Well, I’m back in Seattle.  Back to enjoying the typical summer of a twenty-one year old collegiate athlete, and yes—as a matter of fact—I am glad to be back.  After my return from Amsterdam racing the women’s coxless four for the US, I was met with an overwhelming chorus of support and congratulations from my friends, family and fellow Huskies, for which I was extremely grateful.  The burden of my return has been however, the number of disappointed faces that I have had to meet when I am forced to answer no to the most frequently asked question about my trip (asked mostly by my male Husky counterparts, go figure): “Where’s the medal!?   You’re not wearing it!?”   You know, gosh, I didn’t think to put it on before I went to the store/on a bike ride/to the movies et al.  Sorry guys.  The other question, usually dodged with a little more grace, involves whether or not I patronized any local coffee shops while abroad—the answer, for the inquiring minds of Huskies everywhere, is again, no.  Sorry guys.

I started pre-elite camp on June 3, four days before the completion of my final exams.  Camp was a grueling effort led by our own Eleanor McElvaine with some help from visiting Iowa head coach, Mandi Kowal. Nine other rowers from all over the country and one coxswain also participated.  We trained for four weeks in Seattle out of the Conibear Shellhouse before moving our efforts to the Mercer Training Center in Princeton, New Jersey.  Final selection named me, along with Erin Cafaro (Cal), Stesha Carle (Michigan), and Catherine Starr (Brown) to the US Under-23 roster to represent the US in a straight four.  An additional ten days in the lovely New Jersey climate sealed our final preparation for the trip to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam itself was a beautiful city.  Dubbed “the freest city in the world”, I found the city atmosphere to be quite similar to that of our liberal home-base in Seattle.  The Dutch were extremely friendly and accommodating of our terrible attempts at the Dutch language, and I don’t think we ended up with a surprise on any of our dinner plates any more than once or twice.   The hotel we stayed at hosted the majority of the other visiting teams, including the Aussies, the Italians, the Germans, the French and the British, all of whom brought substantially larger numbers of athletes, and thus were assigned entire floors of the hotel in order to lodge their teams.  The small US squad was nestled on the top floor between some techno-bumping Germans, and some extremely outgoing Danish men, not such a terrible arrangement, save for the impromptu games of football that would crop up at just about any point in the day with makeshift balls being made of just about anything big enough to kick.

The course we raced on was known simply as “The Bosbaan”, a reservoir-shaped course eight lanes wide and just two thousand meters long.  Traffic patterns for practice and warm-up were a little cramped at times, but sometimes a close encounter of the boat-contact kind can lead to the founding of new friendships with your competitors…sometimes not.  More often than not, I found that being cursed at in a foreign language was even more humiliating than being cursed at in English.  Even so, after some close calls and some smooth maneuvering over three days of practice on the Bosbaan, and even a few yellow cards tossed in the direction of the men’s 4x, we were ready to race. 

We drew a solid heat for our first race on Thursday morning, the first race of the day and of the entire regatta:  Great Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, ourselves, Belarus and the Ukraine.  We anticipated an extremely tough race, and got ready to race for a first place finish in order to skip the next day’s repechages and advance directly to the grand final.  As if we weren’t nervous enough pulling up to the starting line, we were firmly reprimanded upon our arrival by the starting official for trying to line up in lane four, with a four marking our bow number—how silly of us!  Someone forgot to give us the memo that because of a wind shift we would be racing a lane over, in lane five.  If that wasn’t enough to make us all sink down in the boat and look like total rookies at this whole “international competition” thing (which was the case for three of us), we were then reprimanded again for our two seat not being dressed “uniform”, as she was the only one of us wearing a t-shirt under her uni.   As it turned out, a little humiliation was all we needed to have a good race, because we went and had a great piece and took the heat by open water.  We were down off the start to all five boats, with a slight veer to starboard (our signature style), and Canada seized an early lead, even calling our bow ball near the 750m mark.  We settled in to our race pace rhythm and steadily moved through all the boats, including Canada, eventually taking a twenty-stoke move at the 1250m that put us a length up on them.  As we entered the final 500m of the race, we moved away to gain an open-water advantage to the finish.   At the finish, Canadian hands went up in protest, as our blades had crossed into their lane during our slick signature starboard-veer off of the start, but the officials ruled that we hadn’t caused a violation, and the protest failed.  After our collective sigh of relief at the failed protest, we broke into huge grins.  The win was both extremely surprising and extremely exciting for us, in the face of our mounting frustrations with ourselves and each other from the past three weeks of training.  We happily chattered the unfolding of our race to Eleanor, took some pictures, and then anxiously looked forward to repechage results the next morning to determine who we would meet in the grand final, three days later. 

Meanwhile, we had two full days to wait before we were slotted to race again.  That wasn’t too much fun. It meant that we got some extra time to spend with our families that had made the trip to watch the races, and to watch the other US boats race in reps and semis, but more than anything the four of us were just anxious to race.  Sunday finally came around, and we lined up against Great Britain, Canada, Belarus, France and Australia.  As we launched for the last time, Eleanor saw us off, and we all realized what we had to do without having to talk about it anymore:  we were going to go win a world championship.

The race in the grand final was a lot like the heat.  We were slow off the start, but settled in to a solid rhythm by the 250m mark, and then just started moving through each boat, one at a time.  Our big fights came on both sides of us:  Belarus on the left, and France on the right.  We knew Belarus to have a strong program, and sure enough, they held on to a lead firmly through the majority of the first half of the race.  France, the winner of the second heat in our event, also put up a good fight, holding on to the silver spot behind Belarus.  We moved through France first, and then slowly picked away at Belarus until we edged them out near the 1500m mark. 

What followed was what I will always remember as the longest 500m of my life.  I admit, I was looking around, wondering where the *$#% the finish line was (and we’ve got the video to prove it) as we fought furiously to hold the lead.  France put on a big push in the sprint, successfully moving through Belarus to take back the silver position, but we were able to hold them off for a 1.9 second win, and the gold medal spot.  None of us really knew what to think as we crossed the finish line, clearly ahead of the field.  I patted my stroke seat on the back, when I had gotten my breath, and said, “fastest in the world, baby!”  And we were, on that day, in that moment.

“Unlikely” was a great word to describe the four of us from the start.  All of us from different collegiate programs, two of us (myself included) were collegiate walk-ons, or “true novices”, three of us new to the international racing scene.  Coming together in June, we were taking on the task of putting together a racing boat to row against crews that had been training together for weeks, and even months longer than us.  Each of us was so incredibly different from one another, it seemed a miracle that we could keep the boat afloat, let alone make it go anywhere fast.  Yet somehow, we did.  I think that our experience at this regatta speaks extremely highly for both the caliber of the US collegiate rowing and racing community, and also the USRowing development processes.  Pre-elite camp and the trip to Amsterdam have taught me immense amounts about myself as an athlete, as a teammate, and as an individual.  I am very grateful to have been able to have had the experiences that I did this summer, even if I don’t show it by wearing my gold medal wherever I go (sorry guys).  As I enter my senior year at the University of Washington, I hope only to be able to transfer what I’ve learned this summer to our women’s program to make our boats go just as fast, and to find just as much success. 

Thanks to everyone for all the support, and we’ll see you on the water!
Go Huskies!

 Megan Kalmoe, ‘06