VAIRES-SUR-MARNE, France — There wasn’t really any way to sugarcoat what happened with America’s Olympic rowing team three years ago in Tokyo.
For the first time in 108 years, American rowers left an Olympics empty-handed. On its own, that was plenty troubling, but it hit particularly hard for the women’s eight, which had been one of the juggernauts of Olympic sports in the 21st century.
The boat had won every major race from 20o6 to 2016, a streak that included every world championship and three consecutive gold medals. Now they and everyone else wearing the stars and stripes were going home with nothing, with three years to turn the ship around, and seven to rebuild the machine ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics.
At the end of the Olympic regatta on Saturday, there was only one big takeaway the Americans could draw: Reclamation projects don’t just happen, especially when the report card is the cold, cruel math of an Olympic medal table that every sport has to deal with, numbers that will now loom in the background of the sound of the clock that ticks away relentlessly toward a deadline in 2028 that will start to feel very close very soon.
There were two medals this time around, with the men’s eight getting the bronze medal Saturday, two days after the men’s four won the gold. Better, yes, but not where they want to be with a once-in-a-generation chance to compete in a home Olympics being top of mind as soon as the flame goes out in Paris on Aug. 11.
All the American athletes in Paris who haven’t already decided to retire have had some percentage of brain space drifting to 2028 for some time now, and there may be no better example of that than the U.S. Rowing hierarchy, from the fundraisers to the athletes, who are determined to get this right once 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 be competitive with the biggest teams, we have to improve, which is basically the fun of the business. You know, you cannot sit back, and if there’s no challenge, it’s no fun.”
True to his word, Verdonkschot resisted patting himself on the back too hard after the men’s eight captured the bronze medal. All medals, regardless of class, are important, of course. But the eight is the flagship of the rowing program, and getting back on the medal stand was important. They make movies and write best-selling books about these boats.
Still, he expressed a mix 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,” Verdonkschot said.
Of course, he has a plan, both in the short-term and the long-term that covers everything from how the team and the coaches interact with collegiate and club rowing, to figuring out how to help rowers stay employed off the water so they can support their Olympic endeavors, to building more training centers.
Those are administrative details, though. Ultimately, if this rebuild is going to prove successful, it will be on the rowers themselves to re-create the sort of culture where success breeds success. That started shortly after Tokyo, too.
Great Britain, the Netherlands and the U.S. come to the finish Saturday in the men’s eight final. Bronze was progress for the U.S., but they want more in L.A. (Alex Davidson / Getty Images)
On Friday morning, after finishing just off the podium in fourth place in the women’s pairs, Jessica Thoennes told a story from the post-Tokyo months, when roughly a dozen of the women who were coming back for this cycle committed to supporting each other in any way they could, whether that was showing up for an early morning training session with someone who needed a lift, or off-handedly telling someone you were proud of them for being brave and trying something new.
“There’s this great quote,” Thoennes said. “Being kind is when you do something for somebody who can do nothing for you.”
That idea became the foundation of where the U.S. rowers wanted to take their program, she said. “When we sat down, we all were like, we all want this. So we’re all buying in.”
The ethos crossed gender lines.
Michelle Sechser, who made the finals but finished sixth in the lightweight, double sculls, said that ahead of Paris she had went through plenty of training sessions on the torturous ergometer with male rowers.
Every endurance sport has its training drudgery. Rowing is the equal of any of them. Spend a few minutes on a rowing machine and you will quickly figure out why. Training buddies can help, especially when slumps, fatigue and injuries cause things to go sideways.
“Progress is not always linear,” Secher said.
Meghan Musnicki, a 41-year-old veteran of those 2010s juggernauts, has seen her event, and women’s sports in general, get increasingly competitive and deep with each cycle.
“Incredible to be a part of it,” she said Saturday after the fifth-place finish. “That’s not to say it isn’t soul-crushing to be on the harsh end of it,” especially Saturday. Musnicki likely won’t be around for Los Angeles, even though she has twice come out of retirement and gotten back in the boat.
On the other hand, the men’s eight was full of Olympic newbies. Only Clark Dean was on the previous U.S. rowing team in Tokyo.
The pandemic made the run-up to those Games somewhat discombobulated, but Dean said even considering that complication, this cycle was far different than anything he has experienced, with the sting of Tokyo driving everyone.
“We red-lined 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, pushing it to the brink of sickness and injury week in, week out.”
There will be plenty more of that with Verdonkschot calling the shots.
He arrived in the U.S. after having built champions in both the Netherlands and Belgium during the past 20 years.
His initial impressions: Big country, lots of athletes, and a vast college system to help train them.
Biggest obstacles to success: The country is so big, and there are so many athletes that it is darn near impossible to unite everyone under one training program. And the college system can be a double-edged sword. It’s great for scouting prospects, but he can’t test them, and he has limited access to them for training and developing them to the world-class standards because, well, they’re busy going to college.
He has set about creating a development pathway with a set series of standards so that all athletes, no matter where they are competing or training, know the numbers they have to hit to be on the national team. He is hunting for a suitable body of water at high altitude, perhaps in Colorado or near Flagstaff, Ariz., for training because that’s what the best teams in the world are doing.
His main order of business though, is to convince the rowers who competed in Paris to keep rowing for another four years, even if that means balancing full-time, or nearly full-time, work with training. The post-pandemic acceptance of remote work helps. Still, it’s not always the easiest argument to make to Ivy League graduates with major earning potential, though Saturday’s bronze medal certainly helped his cause.
“We’re definitely building towards something,” said Nick Rusher, a 2023 Yale graduate and member of the men’s eight 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 eight team celebrating their bronze medal showing Saturday: Justin Setterfield / Getty Images)
