In the course of the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics, on July 26, athletes from the world over will cross the town’s heart, gliding alongside the Seine in a parade of boats. And amongst them might be a robust contingent of Yalies — together with 16 present or former Yale rowers, the most important displaying from the Ivy League in that sport.
These Yale rowers, lots of whom are showing on the Olympics for the second time, will characterize 9 nations and in eight occasions; they embrace two present Yale Faculty college students who will compete within the girls’s occasions and 4 Yale alums who will compete towards one another within the males’s pair.
The presence of such a sturdy Yale crew has particular historic resonance this 12 months. 100 years in the past, Yale’s heavyweight varsity eight — which included Benjamin Spock ’25, who later grew to become a famend pediatrician and creator — represented the USA on the 1924 Summer time Olympics (additionally in Paris). “Yale’s eight stalwart sons raised the Stars and Stripes to the masthead on the Seine banks this afternoon,” The New York Instances reported after the boat’s four-length victory, which “proved them unquestionably the best rowing eight at current on the earth.”
Since then, present and former Yale rowers have recurrently appeared — and positioned — on the Olympics.
In collegiate competitors, each the boys’s and girls’s crews persistently compete on the highest ranges. This 12 months marked the 50th anniversary of the Yale girls’s crew program, which has despatched boats to the NCAA Championship 25 occasions — with 2024 marking the staff’s sixth straight high 10 placement. Since 2017, the boys’s heavyweight varsity crew has received three Intercollegiate Rowing Affiliation’s nationwide championships and, in 2022, the Yale males’s program captured the general nationwide championship.
The enduring power of the Yale program, Michael Gennaro, the Craig W. Johnson ’68 Head Coach of Heavyweight Crew, stated, comes from the eagerness the athletes convey with them.
“I’m not stunned they’re competing at this elite stage, merely due to who they intrinsically are,” stated Gennaro. “These people are extremely motivated and pushed, and plenty of of them arrived at Yale with their eyes already set on competing within the Olympics.”
“Yale student-athletes are dynamic human beings,” stated Will Porter, the Mates of YWC Head Coach for Girls’s Rowing. “The quantity of self-discipline, focus, and power it takes to check on the highest stage and be an athlete on the highest stage is extremely distinctive. Understanding them as individuals and fascinating them within the technique of their improvement, assembly them the place they’re after which pushing them with grace to the subsequent stage is essential.”
Olympic rowers compete on a 2,000-meter course, both in sculls (every rower dealing with two oars) or sweeps (every rower utilizing two arms to drag a single oar). Sweep occasions embrace groups of two, 4, and eight rowers; sculls are single, double, or quadruple. The eight-person crews even have a coxswain to steer and name cadence. Rowing occasions happen over the primary week of competitors, ending on Saturday, Aug. 3.
Six girls from Yale will race in Paris, together with Kristi Wagner ’15, within the U.S. girls’s double (the identical occasion through which she competed in the course of the 2020 Tokyo Summer time Olympics); Daisy Mazzio-Manson ’20, within the U.S. girls’s 4; Sophie Oestergaard ’22, coxswain for Denmark’s girls’s eight; and Margaret Hedeman ’23, within the U.S. girls’s eight. Hedeman, a Massachusetts native who was a first-team All American throughout her senior 12 months at Yale, lately advised The Harmony Bridge, in Harmony, Mass., that rowing at Yale gave her “construction, friendships, and goal.”
Coaching with Wagner and Hedeman on Workforce USA “brings a lot levity and camaraderie,” stated Mazzio-Manson. Her mom, Mary Mazzio, rowed within the 1992 Barcelona Summer time Olympics, and made a well-received documentary concerning the famed 1976 Yale girls’s crew staff lengthy earlier than her daughter determined to attend the college.
At Yale, Mazzio-Manson stated, “I discovered compete, be a constant racer, take pleasure in not simply the races however the on a regular basis practices. I learnt be teammate, be a robust and assured lady, and steadiness rowing and the remainder of life. Rowing at Yale made me the athlete and person who I’m right this moment.”
Two present Yalies are additionally rowing within the girls’s occasions. Christina Bourmpou, who has rowed for 2 years on the Yale staff, might be a part of the ladies’s pair for Greece; she rowed the identical occasion in Tokyo, simply earlier than arriving at Yale. Maya Meschkuleit, heading into her ultimate 12 months at Yale, will row within the Canadian girls’s eight. (“Feeling blessed, grateful and pumped,” Meschkuleit reported on Instagram, posing with an outsized Air Canada ticket to Paris.)
Dan Williamson ’23 was nonetheless a scholar at Yale Faculty when he competed on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had been held over the summer time in 2021). He received gold there, with the New Zealand males’s eight — a consequence, he stated, that grew immediately out of his expertise coaching along with his Yale teammates. “These had been the fellows and women that had pushed me each day to be a greater athlete.”
“It’s a reasonably distinctive sport in school, I feel, within the sense that you just do actually have the perfect on the earth for that age in school,” he added. “It truly is an all-star staff type of scenario.”
This 12 months, rowing within the males’s pair, he’ll take the water with three acquainted faces. Competing once more for New Zealand, he’ll face off towards Ollie Wynne-Griffith ’17, who’s rowing for Nice Britain; Andrin Gulich ’22, for Switzerland; and Simon Keenan ’15, for Australia.
The foremost rowing occasions “at all times type of really feel like a Yale reunion,” stated Gulich, who additionally competed in Tokyo.
“I’ve loads of private connections with guys who I’m immediately racing, which I take pleasure in rather a lot,” stated Wynne-Griffith, who received bronze in Tokyo with the Nice Britain males’s eight. “After which I additionally discover it fairly troublesome — racing associates is more durable than racing strangers.”
Different former Yale rowers in Paris embrace three on the Nice Britain males’s eight: Tom Digby ’20, and two who additionally raced within the Tokyo Olympics, Sholto Carnegie ’18 and Charlie Elwes ’19. Nick Rusher ’23 will row within the U.S. males’s eight; Daire Lynch ’22 will row for Eire within the males’s double; and Fergus Hamilton ’23 might be within the males’s 4 for Australia.
“It’s very particular to soak in that entire Olympic expertise and notice that that is larger than simply you, and it’s larger than your sport, and it’s larger than every other occasion you are ever going to be part of,” stated Wynne-Griffith. “In order that’s one thing that I’m very, very enthusiastic about.”
For Williamson, the lasting lesson he took from Yale: have enjoyable.
“It sounds type of foolish, as a result of how does enjoyable make you go quick? Actually, it is a type of intangible issues,” stated Williamson. “Yale actually simply confirmed me you’ll be able to row at a excessive stage and revel in different components of your life, too.”