Making the USA Olympic Rowing Team

Rowing. One of the most prestigious sports at the Olympic Summer Games. The United States Olympic rowing team. It is practically every professional rowers dream to make it to the world stage and compete with the best in the world. Getting on the team is no easy task, but it sure is easier than winning the sought after gold medal at the Olympics.

There are many procedures that are involved with getting onto the Olympic team. The selection process consists of many layers of regattas and evaluations by the official USA Olympic team coaches and staff. Basic categories separate the athletes into four distinct groups. Boats are named “big boats” and “small boats” which signify the class in which the boat will be chosen as. Then these boats are categorized into a qualified or non-qualified group of boats.

For the athlete, his or her steps for the selection process begin almost an entire year before the Olympics and of course he or she would have been training over the past four years to prepare for the process. Typically, there is a qualification race which is the World Championships or, at a later date, the Olympic Qualification Regatta. This is where the coaches can see the rowers in action and compare their times with the competition. The top two boats in each category of boat class sizes, eights, fours, pairs, doubles, singles, or quads, move onto the next round.

First of all, it is extremely hard for any athlete to even make it to these major regattas. The competition is fierce and only the best of the best move on. Unless the rower is incredibly strong, which there are only a hand-full in the field of competitors, the determining factor to their success is how they row. The efficiency of each stroke must be impeccably good. In rowing, power can only get a rower so far when racing at the highest level. Working together in a boat is the solution to a fast race. Finding and making four guys, let alone eight guys, row altogether in unison with each stroke is essential to speed and strength throughout the race. Even if one person is out of sync during the row, precious seconds will be lost and that could mean between a second or first place finish.

Every rower knows that the pressure is on during every Olympic trial race and that there are no second chances. Learning how to deal with that pressure is what can sometimes win a race and shape a dream into reality. Rowing takes athleticism and mental toughness to a whole new dimension and the Olympic rowers that have achieved this glory are the best examples of what the sport of rowing entails.