11th. It doesn’t seem like a particularly important number when it’s just sitting there, all alone, lacking any sort of context. Just two ones, thrown together, hanging out, minding their own business. Of course, once you start to fill in the blanks, the weight of 11th makes itself known. At the 2010 World Championships in Karapiro, my partner and I finished 11th, a result that was meaningful only in that if we were able to repeat that performance, we would be able to claim an Olympic spot for the US in the lightweight men’s double. I’ve spent the past year training with that in mind. There were other markers along the way, improvements in erg times and in the weight room, speed in the single and the double, winning NSR2 and racing well at World Cups.
But at the end of the day, 11th was the goal of the year, and this year we missed the mark.
As I starting writing this, it seemed to be turning into an argument about why we’re still really good, how we did everything we could to get into the A/B semifinal, how, like seriously guys, come on, we’re really pretty good! But that’s not where I meant to go, so (previous sentence excluded), I’ll move on to my point – failing really sucks.
Like it or not, I’m not racing in the Little League of rowing. The World Championships are the highest level of competition in rowing, and within the Olympic-class lightweight events, the margins are vanishingly small. We’re all the same weight, most of us are using the same equipment, and so any differences in speed are due to fine examples of rowing, raw fitness, and more often than not, brass balls. Coming into the 2011 Worlds, I felt that we had made meaningful changes to at least two of those three categories, with the understanding that all the events here are getting more competitive with Olympic spots up for grabs. We were rowing cleaner, pulling harder than last year, and certainly seemed to be going faster.
Unfortunately the realization that it’s not enough usually comes at a pretty crappy time, and for me it was a couple strokes shy of the finish line in the quarterfinal, four seconds down on the Portuguese. The end result is what matters here, not how hard you tried, and so with the deepest respect to my competitors, and with the full appreciation of just how hard I tried, I can say with authority that it really, really sucked.
Fortunately, the dream ain’t dead. There are two more spots up for grabs in the lightweight double this coming summer in Lucerne at the ominously named Last Chance Qualifier. While it’s hard to peg exactly what you did right and what you did wrong, there are some clear areas of improvement, and while it would have been nice to spend this next year training knowing that the US had a slot, this could be the kick in the ass that I needed to push through to the next level of speed.
Congrats to all the US crews, and, grudgingly, crews from other countries, who secured slots in the Olympics.
- Brian de Regt, USA 2011 LM2x
