Golden rivals and Olympic dreams at annual CanAmMex regatta

This time last year, Lisa Roman and Andrea Proske were training together as part of Canada’s Women’s Eight in the lead up to Tokyo 2020, where they captured Olympic Gold. This past weekend, however, they met as coaches of opposing teams at the annual CanAmMex Regatta featuring some of the top teenaged rowing talent from Canada, the United States and Mexico.

While Roman remained in Canada to take on her role as one coach of her home nation’s aspiring rowers, Proske led a team from The Bahamas at that nation’s first appearance at the event that features a week-long development camp before two days of racing. Although ineligible to take home medals at the traditionally tri-national event, the Bahamian contingent raced for valuable experience in the first international competition for a team of young athletes determined to one day put their Caribbean Island chain on the map as a powerful rowing nation.

A friendly rivalry

“It is a completely different perspective from what I am used to,” Roman says of her new role as coach.  “It has been challenging, but I am enjoying giving back and learning more about the sport than I ever thought possible.”

As for the new rivalry with her former teammate, “it has been awesome,” says Roman. “It is nice to connect and see a familiar face. We’ve been having a lot of fun together.”

Proske felt a similar draw to give back to a sport in which she has accomplished so much and acknowledged the paradoxical difficulty faced by many Olympic gold medalists, suddenly cast adrift in the wake of their success. “The transition after the Olympics is often tough,” she says. “So I gave myself a year to give back to sport.”

That year involved plans for a short trip to The Bahamas to work with developing rowers. “I went down for two weeks and will be leaving four months later,” says Proske of her role as interim lead coach, which will wrap up this August with the arrival of a full-time head rowing coach.

“I have been pushing the same principles that took us to gold,” she says of the experiences she is now sharing with a group of determined athletes learning what it will take to succeed on the world stage. Those principles are: have fun, leave it all on the water and don’t be afraid of failure. “Failing forward,” Proske calls it.

They are lessons that resonate with rowers from islands with a strong tradition of international success in sports like track and field and swimming. “Both translate will to rowing,” says Proske, who felt that the CanAmMex camp and regatta experience was a good opportunity for the Bahamian high schoolers in the sport.

“I think it is huge for experience,” echoes Roman, speaking of the regatta’s significance not just for her own Canadian juniors, but all the aspiring young rowers taking part. “You get to train and compete with new people who you are eventually going to meet again down the road. It is a steppingstone along the way.”

Olympic dreams

“It is a big accomplishment to be here,” says Crachante Laing, a student at Windsor High School near The Bahamas capital city, Nassau on New Providence Island. “It is amazing to see the standard of rowing and how far I can really get.”

“I feel like there truly is no limit,” she adds. “Before CanAmMex we have been doing morning practices and I thought that was super intense. Now I see we have got to train two or three times a day. There really is no limit when you are trying to be the best you can be.”

For Laing, being the best includes the desire to attend university in the United States, where she can pursue academics and rowing at the highest levels in preparation for life and sport beyond. “If I can go to the Olympic level, that would be beautiful. I am trying to see how far I can go.”

It is a similar story for her teammate Kameron Tylor. “I also hope to row in college,” he says. “I have learned so many things since starting the sport. Rowing has given me a great sense of grit, work ethic and something to keep me motivated when nothing else will.”

As for his dream to one day represent The Bahamas at the World Rowing Championships and the Olympics, “this regatta has been a great reality check,” Tylor says. “We see what there is out there and what we are up against. For me it means I will bring more vigour to training, more intensity, working even harder and finding the love in it because now I have something tangible to train towards.”

“We are surrounded by so much water,” adds Laing, about the potential for rowing to grow in her islands. “I think everyone will fall in love with rowing once they get in the boat.”

That sort of deep love for the sport, as so many rowers around the world know, can be a powerful motivator to inspire creativity in training and render sustainable the highest levels of performance.

“Because we don’t recognize what limitations there are,” says Proske of the Bahamian attitude towards the sport, “we don’t have any restrictions of ourselves. If we need to do hill runs, if we don’t have access to ergs, if there are lightning storms happening that get us on and off the water, it is just adapting to those obstacles is something these rowers have become very good at rising above. We don’t see those limitations.”

CanAmMex Results

As for results from the regatta itself, the American crews carried home the overall trophy, claiming victory in eight of twelve events including women’s and men’s eights.

Full results available on Regatta Central here https://www.regattacentral.com/regatta/results2/?job_id=7844