Image Credit: World Rowing
With the funding and training model in the United States operating differently from most other major rowing nations, there is a great propensity for dips in form at the World Rowing Championships following an Olympic Games. However, this was not the case in Shanghai, as several standout performances suggested real promise as the squad looks towards a home Olympic Games in three years’ time.
For the women’s squad, Paris represented a second consecutive Olympic Games without a rowing medal. Once the envy of all, the US collegiate development system had seemingly become more useful for international programmes than homegrown talent. However, this year the women’s squad turned that around. In the women’s four, they boated a crew with representation from Texas, Stanford, Washington and Princeton – arguably the four biggest programmes in the sport over the post-COVID era. This crew, having won in Varese and Lucerne, was the class of the field, moving from the back of the pack to win a commanding gold medal at the Shanghai Water Sports Centre, showing the profits of the collegiate system. Moreover, there were more medals to come from the women’s sweep group as the Washington-educated pair of Holly Drapp and Jess Thoennes won a bronze medal, the first time the US sweep has won two medals at the same global championships since 2018.
On the men’s side, the eight was the clear priority for the sweep squad, and they delivered a strong result. Leading their rivals from the UK for the vast majority of the course, they will be very disappointed to have let the silver medal slip from their grasp on the finish line. However, with a significantly shorter campaign than Great Britain, there is hope to build on throughout the Olympiad. However, one product of their prioritisation of the eight drove much discussion online. After making the B-final in the men’s coxless four, the crew treated the race as a training session, racing only to the halfway mark before paddling the remainder of the course. Whether this is disrespectful to the event or the natural consequence of doubling up is open to debate, but it allowed the crew to win a medal the following day in brutal conditions.
Across both sculling squads, two results stand out. For the men, a fourth-place finish in the quad shows potential in the boat class as the very strong group of athletes prioritise the crew over previous Olympic selections in both the eight and the single. If they can continue developing the boat class, they will be eying a first medal since 1996, the last time the Olympic regatta was on US waters.
The standout athlete among the women’s scullers was Michelle Sechser, who failed to make the openweight team but instead won the trial for the lightweight single scull. Similar to the gold-medal-winning four, Sechser sat deeper in the pack in the opening stages before moving through the field, taking a strong lead and holding off a late surge from the Chinese sculler Pan Dandan in the final moments to become possibly the oldest ever winner of an able-bodied World Rowing Championship gold medal.
Elsewhere in the sculling squad, the results were poorer, as both doubles and the women’s quad failed to reach the A-final. The all-Wisconsin women’s double finishing eight was the best of the remaining results.
The mixed events were new to this year’s championships, and the US squad embraced them. After winning the first-ever gold medal in the mixed eight at the World Rowing Cup in Varese, the women’s four could not become double champions, finishing fourth in the final as they were joined by some of the men’s eight and quad. In the mixed double, the heat did not go according to plan for Jacob Plihal and Katheryn Flynn, who finished well off the pace before winning the B-final.
Rounding out the US squad was their only para rowing entry in the PR3 mixed coxed four. Returning just one rower and cox, Emilie Eldracher, from their silver-medal-winning crew at the Paris Paralympic Games, they were looking to continue their medal-winning success in this event. However, this was not the case. While the crew had a fast finish, they left it too late, finishing fourth in the final, just a canvas off the podium.
This was a reasonably successful World Rowing Championships for the United States team. They won four medals and two more fourth-place finishes, while the women’s four represented their first world title in an Olympic event since 2018. The squad will look to build on their performance across this Olympiad as they seek to peak on home water in just three years.
