Ganes rows toward Olympic dream
Rower trades hoops for oars
Carolyn Ganes always wanted to be in the Olympics. She shared that dream with her parents while still a little girl growing up in Saskatoon, and — after sprouting to 6-foot-3 — she bounced through most of two aborted Olympic cycles with the national women’s basketball team.
Then she retired, and stuffed that dream into a dark, faraway corner ... or so she thought, until she watched the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony wit h a friend and realized she still wanted to get there. Wanted it so badly it hurt.
“(The friend) saw me hit rock-bottom,” Ganes said this week from London, Ont. “It just hit me — it happened as the rowing team was walking out on TV. My poor friend is trying to console me, then he sees the rowing team, and he says ‘well, I bet if you trained really hard for four years, you could be there. You’re tall, they’re tall ... why not?’
“I sat on it for awhile, then in January one morning, I woke up and thought ‘today’s the day. I’m going to be a rower now.’ ”
So after a brief period of limbo between hardwood and water, she’s in London, Ont., training with the national rowing team, her Olympic dreams refreshed.
Last year, Ganes was six-100ths of a second away from qualifying for the Olympics in pairs.
This summer, she’s attempting to land an alternate Olympic berth on the eights team, with plans to keep at the sport through at least the 2016 Olympic cycle.
“It’s been a wild ride,” says the 28-year-old Ganes.
“At this time four years ago, I was feeling pretty lost in the world. I’d finished basketball, I was comfortable with that decision, but I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
Ganes, one of the best high school basketball players ever to come out of Saskatoon, moved from Aden Bowman to a five-year career as a forward with the University of Oregon Ducks. She spent 2000 through 2007 in the national-team hoops program and played on two squads that failed to nab an Olympic berth. She’d never rowed, ever, until taking it up out of the blue in the winter of 2009.
“It’s actually kind of embarrassing how little I knew about rowing when I started the sport,” Ganes says now. “I didn’t know how long the race was ... I didn’t know anything about it. I can see how, from an outside perspective, it can be a dull sport to watch because you see people do the same thing over and over again, and what they’re doing looks so easy. If you’ve never tried it, you don’t appreciate how hard it is and how hard they’re working.”
Ganes says she doesn’t miss basketball. She realized while playing professionally in Spain that her heart was no longer in it, and she was at peace with her decision to quit.
But she remained highly competitive, and needed an outlet. That’s where rowing came in — and some notable connections that moved her closer to national-team status.
Her first step after deciding to take up rowing was to enter a two-km ergonomic rowing competition through a local Vancouver club near where she lived. She mentioned to a friend that she’d entered the competition but didn’t know what she was doing. That friend said he knew a rower who could help her, and that rower taught her technique, gave her training ideas, and even took her on as a training partner in the days leading up to the competition.
She told her friend how great this rower was to work with, and he replied: “Yeah — you know he just won a gold medal in Beijing, right?”
That assistance from Ben Rutledge gave Ganes a stable base that was enhanced when she met, and later worked with, renowned Canadian sculling coach Dick Mcclure during her stillformative phase.
“I feel like this kind of fell into my lap,” Ganes says now. “It feels like it was meant to be, because it was one thing after another, like a domino effect.
“I’ve been so lucky to have stumbled onto this, and to have met the people who helped me get to this point, and the coaching I’ve gotten. I feel I’d robbing myself if I didn’t see how far I could go and how good I could get.”
So Ganes is travelling the world, toiling atop bodies of water instead of basketball courts, hoping to land that spot as an alternate on the eights squad after her shot at getting there in pairs ended with a literal photo finish.
Ganes admits that she sometimes ponders what might have happened if she’d focused on rowing instead of basketball during her formative years — what directions her life might have taken.
“My dad’s mentioned a couple of times that it never even crossed his mind to put me in rowing when I was growing up,” Ganes says. “But it’s worked out for the best. I know a lot of people who burn out with rowing, because it is such an intense sport. You’re training three times a day, six days a week, and when you do it for years and years and years, I’d see how it can take a toll. It’s nice to have all the experience in high-performance sport, but at the same time, be fresh to rowing itself.”
Ganes rarely picks up a basketball these days. A few weeks ago, she shot some hoops with a London specialeducation class she works with. That’s about as serious as it gets on the court now, though she admits the temptation is always there to test her old skills against fellow rowers. But a comeback? No. “Oh my gosh, it would be ugly if I got on the court now,” Ganes said with a chuckle. “When we’re overseas with the men’s team, though, we’re always talking about how we’re going to play two-on-two basketball and set up a little tournament. But I’m pretty sure the coaches would put a stop to that real quick.”