By Michael Lapointe
A year after the Canadian women’s eight rowing team brought home the silver medal at the London Olympics last summer, Ottawa natives Sarah Black and Kate Goodfellow are working hard to make the group headed for Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
The women grab lunch every day at a local diner in London, Ont. after the first of three daily training sessions on the water. It’s a grueling schedule, with hours comparable to those of a full-time job.
“Forty hours of training a week is not for everybody, and it’s definitely not something you can just dive into with no experience,” Goodfellow says. “We’ve built up to this to the point where it is a lifestyle.”
So far the two are looking good this year as they helped the women’s eight take home the bronze medal at the Samsung Rowing World Cup in Australia in late March.
“There were some encouraging results (at the World Cup) but it also shows us we have a lot more work to do this season, with even more needed heading into 2016,” Goodfellow highlights.
Black and Goodfellow both began their careers in Ottawa, but never competed together until 2011.
Black started at Elmwood School when she was in Grade 9 following some encouragement from her mother to try something a little off the radar.
“It is kind of an obscure sport that unless you know it and seek it out, you don’t really stumble into like basketball or soccer,” Black notes.
A few years later, she registered with the Ottawa Rowing Club and things continued to take off from there. She made the first cut for the Olympic selection camp for London last summer and ended up training with them in the months leading up to the Games.
Black says the experience “set me up to know what to expect for this next cycle, which really was my goal in the first place.”
Goodfellow’s start came even later when she joined the novice team in her first year at the University of Ottawa five years ago. She took to the sport quickly, and had the distinction of being named the Ottawa Sports Awards female athlete of the year in 2012 after helping Canada’s women’s eight win the under-23 world championship gold medal.
The upcoming Olympics provide a particularly good opportunity for young athletes to get to the next level, Goodfellow indicates.
“There are only a couple of girls that were around in the last Olympic cycle,” she explains. “A lot of girls from the last quadrennial team retired so it’s a big turnover year.”
The squad at this point is largely made up of rowers from the under-23 championship team, the Olympic development team, and a couple of athletes that have been in the Olympic program for some time.
But because the Olympic team won’t be named until the last minute in June 2016, “at this point it’s anyone’s guess what will happen,” Black notes.
The next big event for the women are Rowing Canada’s spring trials in early May and then the World Cup team selection camp later this summer.