Gold for Eight Oars, Two from Radcliffe

The U.S. women’s eight-oared crew won the gold medal in its final London Olympics race on the course at Eton Dorney on Thursday, August 2.  By finishing in 6:10:59 to defeat the silver-medal boat from Canada by nearly a second and a half, the Americans succeeded in defending the Olympic championship their eight captured at Beijing in 2008 and added a third gold medal to the U.S. record in this event. (The first came at Los Angeles in 1984.) The Canadian team finished in 6:12.06, while the Netherlands took the bronze in 6:13.12. The New York Times report on the race includes a visually beautiful three-minute video on the crew.

Two rowers in the victorious boat, Caryn Davies ’05 and Esther Lofgren ’09, rowed for the Radcliffe crew as undergraduates. They appear in a roundup of Crimson athletes at the London Games.  In addition, Davies was profiled in Harvard Magazine in 2003, and the Harvard Crimson ran a profile of Lofgren this year. Lofgren’s blog, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” narrates her Olympic adventures.