LONDON — Now is no time to talk.

The U.S. women’s eight rowers were off limits to media as of Thursday at the Olympic Games.

For good reason.

The defending gold medalists, including Boothbay Harbor’s Eleanor Logan, are focused on Sunday’s heats.

Logan — a graduate of Brooks School (2006) and Stanford University (2011) — is among six in the U.S. boat who return from winning gold at the Beijing Olympics.

Since then, as it has every year since Australia won in 2005, the American women’s eight has won the world championships — three in a row since Beijing. Every woman on the U.S. roster has been a world champion, Olympic gold medalist or both.

Advertisement

Count Logan, in the No. 6 seat, among the latter group.

Listed at 6-foot-2, 175 pounds, she is joined in London by Erin Cafaro (bow), Zsuzsanna Francia (2 seat), Esther Lofgren (3), Taylor Ritzel (4), Meghan Musnicki (5), Caroline Lind (7), Caryn Davies (stroke) and Mary Whipple (cox).

“We go in knowing what’s coming,” said Logan, in a phone interview after making the U.S. team. “There’s some new blood on the boat, but we all know what we want to do.”

On Sunday, the U.S. will go in the first of two heats, matched against Germany, 2011 Worlds bronze-medalist Great Britain and Australia. The other heat will feature 2010 and 2011 Worlds runner-up Canada, defending Olympic bronze-medalist Romania and Beijing silver-medalist the Netherlands.

The winner of each heat advances to Thursday’s finals. The others go to Tuesday’s repechage.

While the American boat is loaded with veteran talent, so is Team Canada. Seven in the Canadian boat were on last year’s world championships runner-up team.

Advertisement

Great Britain’s third-place team returns six and will no doubt get an extra oomph from the home crowd.

Tom Terhaar, the coach of the U.S. crew, said his team, while favored, is taking nothing for granted. He remembers 2004, when the U.S. eight was favored to take the gold, but finished second to Romania.

“The Olympics are always different than the world championships, always,” he said in a U.S. Rowing press release. “And it’s always closer than you think. I always tell (the crews), it’s going to be tight and it’s going to be close. In 2004, there were six boats dead level at the thousand and we had races leading up to it that looked like that.”

Logan said a month ago that training for this Olympics almost began immediately after the last Olympics.

“You’re training cycle is a four-year cycle,” she said. “You want to make sure your body is peaking for the Olympics.”

Terhaar said there is no way you can focus in on just one team. While Romania has medalled in every Olympics since 1980 — three golds, three silver and two bronze — there are too many good crews. The U.S. beat Canada by just 0.03 seconds in the World Cup finals.

Advertisement

“We’ll do what we can do,” he said. “You never know who is going to show up. There are only a couple of crews that won’t be in the medal hunt, but I would say there are five that are going to be in the hunt for sure.”

The U.S. team has been in London for two weeks already, adjusting to the time change and the venue. They did not attend the Opening Ceremonies.

Logan, 24, counts the 2004 national championship in the Brooks School “Blonde Boat” among her most memorable achievements.

Now, she could make it two Olympic golds in a row.

And surely that would be memorable.


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.