Westlake’s Margot Shumway takes a break during the national Selection Regatta last April. She took third in the women’s double, which gave her and her partner, Reilly Dampeer, the opportunity to try out for the women’s quad and compete in the Beijing Summer Olympics. Shumway was officially named to the Olympic team June 27. (Photo courtesy of Julia Shumway)

Shumway rows on to Beijing
By Jim Horvath
Sports
Published July 9, 2008

It’s been a long road from the basketball court at Westlake High School to the United States Rowing Training Center in Princeton, New Jersey for Margot Shumway.

It’s an even longer road to Beijing, China, but it’s a road Shumway finds herself traveling on today.

Shumway, who didn’t pick up on the sport of rowing until her junior year at Ohio State, was chosen as one of the eight women who will represent the United States in next month’s Summer Olympic Games in China. The Westlake grad will row in the stroke for the women’s quadruple sculls when the games begin August 9. The finals will be held August 16-17 at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park.

“I’m really, really excited for our team,” said Shumway last Thursday between training sessions in New Jersey. “We’ve got just a phenomenal group on both the men’s and the women’s side, and we’d like to go over there racing our best and bring back a gold medal.

“It’s the Olympics, and the competition will be tough,” she said. “There’s Great Britain and China, and Germany has a lot of experience coming back, so we’ve got our work cut out for us. But we wouldn’t have it any other way. If we put the pedal to the metal, I think we have a great chance to win a medal.”

The road to Beijing has been an interesting one for Shumway, who left high school wanting to walk on to the Ohio State women’s basketball team. When that goal went unrealized, she was approached by the coaches of the university’s rowing program.

“We asked her why she didn’t row her freshman and sophomore years,” recalled Buckeyes coach Andy Teitelbaum. “It wasn’t like people hadn’t asked her to come out. At the time, though, she said she was ‘too cool’ to row. Fortunately, she rethought that.

“We’re really excited, and more than anything we’re thrilled for her,” said Teitelbaum. “She started the sport late, then after college she worked really hard to learn how to scull. I know she’s struggled with some injuries, but her tenacity to fight through obstacles has been impressive. She’s definitely a great athlete, and despite starting the sport late she was in a varsity boat at the NCAA’s that year.

“Really, her time here was too short. I wish we could of had her for a full four years, but I’m glad we found her a second time and got her to give it a try,” he added.

Margot Shumway put away her basketball sneakers and turned them in for a pair of oars when she began competing with the Ohio State rowing team in 2001. She helped the Buckeyes win their first Big Ten title in 2002. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Rowing)

During her two seasons with the Buckeyes, Shumway was instrumental in helping OSU achieve many program firsts. In 2002, her senior year, the program won its first Big Ten championship in rowing and was ranked in the top three for first time as well.

Behind the First Varsity Eight, which became the program’s first boat to qualify for the Grand Final of the NCAA Championships, the Buckeyes went on to finish fifth in the nation.

Shumway, who now resides in Arlington, Virginia and rows for the Potomac Boat Club, is the first Buckeye to make the Olympic Team in rowing.

“I’ve been involved with rowing for quite a long time, and Margot is one of those people who always went all out,” said Buckeyes assistant coach Diana Albrecht, who was a teammate of Shumway is at OSU.

“She’s always kept the same intensity…she never backs off from a hard workout. She’s incredibly tough. She really lives for the sport, and that’s one of the characteristics of those who move on into the elite and national teams,” said Albrecht.

After her quad finished fifth at the World Championships in Japan in 2005, Shumway injured her lower back later that year. It took her awhile to fully recover, but her tenacity paid off and her dream of making the Olympic team continued.

“Back in the fall of 2005 I was experiencing some lower back pain,” said Shumway. “That’s a pretty common injury in this sport because of its dynamics. That was hard, though, because I had already made the National Team, then three months later I was sitting on an exercise bike.

“In March of 2006, I started racing singles and was just trying to go through the process of getting myself physically and mentally ready. I couldn’t keep up, and it was a pretty tough experience. But it made me more aware of myself both mentally and physically, and in the long run it made me stronger.

“Later in the year, I went back down to Washington and started training again,” she said. “It took some time, but I finally got to that point where I didn’t feel like I was going to hurt myself again. That was late fall, then in January of 2007 I did a lot of indoor training, and things were pretty good from there.”

Later that year, Shumway began the nine-month journey toward Beijing. She was officially chosen for the team June 25, and the official announcement was made June 27.

“We started after the World Championships last summer,” said Shumway. “We were down to 16 women after the initial races in April. We had a lot of respect for each other after training together for so long. Unfortunately, not everyone can make it, and those who didn’t make it are really good athletes.

“It’s a really intense experience. Throughout the process, there’s such a buildup with all of the expectations. When I made the team, there was this really big high, but at the same time a huge low because the whole thing was just so physically and mentally draining.

“Now we’re focused on Beijing. We have two practices on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and three practices per day the rest of the week. We’ll start our morning session at 6:50 a.m. and have the boats in the water by 7 a.m. Later in the morning, we’ll go from 11 a.m. to around 12:30 p.m., then early in the evening from 5-6:30 p.m.

“Right now, we’re more into the aerobic workouts, keeping our heart rates up. We work on skills and techniques during our rows, and we do weight training on Tuesdays and Fridays. We’ve stepped back from race pace, but once we get closer to the Olympics we’ll pick that up again,” she said.

Shumway and her teammates will leave for China on July 26, about a week and a half prior to the Games’ opening ceremonies August 8.

Still, the fact that she’ll be sitting on that plane hasn’t quite sunk in yet for Westlake’s Olympic representative.

“It was always something I’d talk about,” said Shumway. “It was always sort of this abstract thing in my head. Most of my goals were much more shorter term. But yes, we’d talk about it at breakfast, things like ‘I wonder what it would be like’ and ‘who’s going to make the team.’

“It seemed so far away at the time, and even now it seems far away. But it does seem a lot more real, because now I know I will get to experience competing in the Olympics. I think it’s really going to hit me when I’m on that long plane ride. There’s been so much training, there’s really no time to sit back and think about it,” she said.

“It’s funny, because when I was a freshman at Ohio State all I wanted to do was play basketball,” she said. “But once the rowing bug bit, I would always go to the max. It’s been a day-to-day process. I’ve competed with the best, and through it all I never felt like my spot was secure.

“There were times I knew I was good enough, but you just had to keep going, had to stay determined. In the end, it’s kind of how the cards fell. I pushed through until the end, and now I’m going to the Olympics to try and bring back a gold medal,” she said.