Former Ohio State rower and three-time NCAA champion Holly Norton (front left) competes with the Great Britain national team. Norton was set to make her first Olympic appearance this summer before the events were postponed March 24. Credit: Holly Norton.
Nearly 50 Buckeyes on Ohio State’s Olympic watch list saw their dreams of reaching sports’ pinnacle this summer shattered this past week, but for a handful of rowers, the postponement pain might sting a bit more.
With qualifying trials still to come for most Olympic sports, several former Buckeye rowing team members were the only Ohio State athletes to have cemented spots on their national teams in Tokyo leading up to the March 24 announcement.
For South Africa native Holly Norton, a three-time NCAA champion at Ohio State from 2013 to ’16, the delay could mean her Olympic aspirations for Great Britain’s national team have been extinguished altogether.
“I was making sure that I was getting my hat in the ring for jobs and all of that kind of thing,” Norton said. “And whereas now, I have to decide whether I’m going to follow through with those jobs or am I going to put everything on hold for another year? So it’s quite a big decision for me personally.”
While Norton said she loves rowing, the 2016 World Rowing Championships gold medal winner said doing it professionally will not occupy her entire career. Norton, now 27 years old, said the balance in her life has started to shift, and she was hoping to tick the Olympic box off her list this year.
“It’s really forcing me to take an assessment of my life and what I want to be getting out of my life at this point in time, and how this now fits that plan,” Norton said.
Former Ohio State rower Holly Norton (front left) competes in a race for the Buckeyes in 2015. Credit: Holly Norton.
Despite the reservation to enter another year of training that she said won’t guarantee her a qualifying slot, Norton’s workout regimen during quarantine suggests she’s not finished quite yet.
The former psychology major said she used her once-a-day allotment of outdoor exercise in Henley-on-Thames, England, to run a half marathon just two days after the Olympic postponement was announced.
In fact, she was recovering from overtraining syndrome in South Africa just weeks earlier, and had to be isolated in England upon her return for precautionary COVID-19 concerns. It was there she saw news that Canada and Australia had pulled out of the Olympics, at which point she said the eventual outcome was inevitable.
“Although sports are big and they have the ability to unite nations and the power of sport can be really big, when there’s a global pandemic happening, sports becomes pretty trivial,” Norton said.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom, however, stands at nearly a third the amount in Italy, where Alessandra Montesano was taking a year off her Buckeye career to vie for one of six open spots on the national rowing team leading up to the Olympics.
Montesano, who left Columbus, Ohio, after a year and a half to focus on Olympic training, lives in Northern Italy near the town of Codogno –– where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in the country.
“It’s kind of scary to see all the towns empty. Completely empty, like there’s no one outside, nobody’s going to work besides a few people,” Montesano said.
While Montesano said she knows some people who have contracted the virus in her area by name, her family and close friends are not among them.
Alessandra Montesano (right) competes for the Italian national rowing team. Montesano took time off from Ohio State to train for the 2020 Olympics. Credit: Alessandra Montesano.
The Italian national team had camp in a town neighboring Rome before doctors deemed it unsafe for the athletes. Now, Montesano said her coaches have distributed home workout plans for the team to stay in shape.
“It’s hard thinking about a new year of training, but at the same time I’m still motivated because I really want to go to the Olympics,” Montesano said. “I’m gonna keep training and I can just think now that it’s, like, 2019. We have a year to go.”
The postponement means Montesano has to take another year away from Ohio State. She wants to take classes online, but with scholarship issues and her international status, Montesano said it’s not an easy process.
Aina Cid made the same choice four years ago, taking time off after winning a national rowing title at Ohio State to return to Spain and pursue her Olympic dream.
Not only did she qualify, but Cid placed sixth in the Olympic final in Rio de Janeiro. Despite once again having locked down a spot on the team, Cid won’t be able to improve on her 2016 finish with an encore performance this year.
“When I started the season, I had to do huge psychological mental work that I had to carry on, and I feel like I invested so much time,” Cid said. “Now it just feels like I have to start again. When you mentally prepare for a race and that doesn’t happen, all that energy goes to waste, pretty much.”
Cid said she feels down as a result, but the delay won’t deter her from striving for a medal moving forward. She said that even after her eventual showing in 2021, she’d be open to another crack at the Olympic ranks in 2024.
Despite the disappointment, Norton, Montesano and Cid all said the right decision was made in postponing the tournaments for the sake of public health.
Cid said the reward of a great performance may be even greater in 2021 given the turmoil, and even if Norton isn’t competing, she said the whole world will be looking forward to the Olympics as a potential celebration after the pandemic.
“It can be really exciting because it’ll be something that everyone can get behind and everyone’s gonna have their nation competing,” Norton said. “And it’ll hopefully be something uplifting after a pretty horrendous time for them for the world.”
