This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and while I have always been and shall always remain an Olympics junkie, this particular Olympic Games holds special meaning for me. This is the twentieth anniversary of me being drawn into the fate of our Canadian Olympic rowers by virtue of the exposure of a horrific injury suffered by Silken Laumann just months before the games.
In as much as Silken's recovery and bronze medal performance were inspirational and somehow beyond belief, I was more mesmerized by the sight of our women's eight bombing down the 2,000m course en route to a gold medal. I'd never seen anything as poetic and perfectly synchronous and beautiful as that race, not prior and not since. I was hooked! In a post race interview, Marnie McBean (a member of the Canadian Women's Eight) was asked how she got into rowing. She replied that she wanted to learn how to row, and when she went to the phone book the first relevant entry she found was under the A. Alas, the Argonaut Rowing Club became Marnie's home club. I grabbed the phone book, found their number, and in the spring of 1993 I enrolled in a learn to row program at the very same Argonaut Rowing Club.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I'm as moved by the beauty of rowing now as I was on that day in 1992. The only difference now is that I get to go out there every day and and feel the wonder of my boat's buoyancy as I push it along the surface of the water, usually as the sun rises just off my boat's bow or stern.
I have rowed with some wonderful people over the years, all of whom have become part of a lovely, tight circle of friends whose gatherings are nothing short of brilliant fun. Metaphorically if not literally, we will be joined at the hip in perpetuity... and Amen to that. For the past three years I have rowed with a truly phenomenal group of women who represent The Toronto Sculling Club. We have (twice, just sayin') won the Head of the Charles Regatta and have forged bonds both on and off the water that are as special as any I've known. I'm truly blessed to be part of this crew. One day I will write about the wonderful, full-circle connection between the 1992 Olympic Gold Medal winning women's eight from Barcelona and the Toronto Sculling Club women's eight from, um, The Humber River, but for now I offer this:
First row of the year tomorrow... always a magical thing. To mark this, I shall post a picture that I know the rowers among us will truly appreciate ;-)
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