Longevity and success is the Karsten recipe

This list includes Belarus’s Ekaterina Karsten who, at the age of 41, is ranked as the number one female athlete in the sport of rowing for 2013. With an impressive 12 gold medal points, Karsten’s accomplishments in the sport of rowing cannot go unnoticed.

Recruited from the small village of Osetcheno under the Soviet sporting system, 14 year-old Karsten did not take long to prove she could be number one. In her international debut Karsten rowed the junior women’s single sculls as a member of the Soviet Union and became a Junior World Champion. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Karsten competed for two years as a part of the Unified Team, made up of athletes from most of the ex-republics of the Soviet Union. She went on to win her first Olympic medal in the women’s quadruple sculls, at the 1992 Barcelona Games.  She was 20 years old.

In 1993 Karsten represented Belarus for the first time, finishing seventh in the women’s double sculls at the World Rowing Championships. Karsten then moved into the single before the 1996 Olympic Games where she began a winning streak that would take her from an Olympic gold in 1996 through all but one international race to a second Olympic gold in Sydney. Continuing in the single, Karsten picked up a silver and bronze medal at the next two Olympic Games as well as several World Champion titles along the way.  

A fifth place at the London Olympics caused many to wonder if this would be the end to Karsten’s long and successful career. But after 23 years of competition, Karsten is not ready to put down her oar. “I am very lucky because since I started in 1987, this is always what I wanted to do. My hobby became my job. I must say I don’t feel my age. Others are astonished, I’m not,” Karsten says.

This season’s surprise was not that Karsten competed, but rather that she moved out of the single, which she has raced in for more than 17 years, and into a double with 30-year-old Yuliya Bichyk, Belarus’s next most accomplished rower. Together they won a bronze medal at the 2013 European Rowing Championships, finished fourth at the third World Rowing Cup in Lucerne, Switzerland and came from behind at the World Rowing Championships in Chungju, Korea to take bronze.

This medal secured Karsten the top spot on the 2013 Top Female Rowers list, for which eligibility requires the rower to have medalled at a World Championships or Olympics Games in the current year and also takes into account the athletes’ Olympic and World Championship results. A point value system is used corresponding to medals won.

At every step along the way fans, reporters and coaches have asked Karsten if she will continue through this Olympic cycle to Rio. She responds that she is pretty sure she will.

Find the 2013 Top 10 list here.