By Brendan McConnell
In the rowing world, the highest honour that a club can bestow upon an athlete is naming a boat after them.
The Ottawa Rowing Club may be a bit busy in the paintjob department this fall thanks to the performances of their athletes at the Aug. 25-Sept. 1 World Rowing Championships in Chungju, Korea.
With five female Ottawa Rowing Club athletes on race sheets for the worlds – which made up almost half of Team Canada – international athletes were given a healthy dose of our national capital hometown rowing talent, and they didn’t disappoint, collecting three sets of medals for Canadian crews.
Sarah Black, an Ottawa native who began rowing in Grade 9 at Elmwood School, took home silver and bronze medals from the women’s 4 and 8 events, each time trailing the dominant team from the United States.
Black celebrated her 24th birthday the same day she won silver in the 4 race, where Canada powered past a strong Australian crew for silver.
“We talked about taking it more aggressively off the start in the first 400 or 500 metres than we did in the previous race and I think we executed that really well,” Black said in a Rowing Canada news release. “It felt great.”
Goodfellow, who got her start in the sport just four years ago with the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees rowing club, earned a bronze in the Aug. 31 quadruple sculls event – Canada’s first at the world level in the Olympic discipline since the 1990s.
“We stuck to our race plan,” Goodfellow said via Rowing Canada. “We knew we had contact with Germany early on but in the end they were just too quick.”
Ottawa club draws from afar
Apart from Black and Goodfellow, Team Canada also featured double-silver medalist Cristy Nurse (Georgetown, Ont.), as well as women’s 8 medalist Carolyn Ganes (Saskatoon, SK) and 8 alternate Rosie DeBoef (Victoria, B.C.) – all transplanted out-of-towners who moved to the Ottawa Rowing Club in recent years.
“It’s a tremendous inspiration for all the other rowers and coaches,” says Ottawa Rowing Club president Lana Burpee, who already named boats after both Black and Goodfellow last year on the heels of a world record-setting performance at the U23 worlds two seasons ago.
Burpee credits the athletes’ incredibly strong work ethic for their success, along with dedicated coaches at ORC and one of the strongest training programs offered in Canada.
“I think it’s a combination of a lot of things that are going right at the Ottawa Rowing Club,” she indicates. “Basically we have a history of rowing, we have exceptional coaches that dedicate a lot of their time, we have good water and we have excellent racing opportunities.”