With season looming, Alberto adds a spark
With the coronavirus pandemic preventing fans from attending games at least initially this season, Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said Saturday that he would be open to fan noise being played inside empty ballparks during the upcoming 60-game campaign, if only to distract from the eerie quiet that would otherwise be present.
Luckily for Hyde, infielder Hanser Alberto has done his best to provide a crowd’s worth of noise throughout the first week of the team’s preseason camp at Camden Yards. During Baltimore’s first few intrasquad games in an empty Oriole Park, Alberto has been easily heard cheering, continuing a show of enthusiasm that became a trademark during his first year with the Orioles in 2019.
“It’s not about the fans. It’s all me,” Alberto said. “That’s me right there. I play with energy without fans or with fans in the stands. I think that’s a new challenge for everyone, so we’ll have to keep our focus and try to be the same guy in the clubhouse, in the dugout, outside on the field. So I think that will help because I know without fans, it’s a little harder for us because you want to see that crowd over there.
to focus on.”
The competition spread over June and the first few days of July, from the Round of 64 on down, with each round’s distance or time styled after real-world rowing events.
Unlike most rowing contests, it also paid handsomely — around $30,000, spread among the various categories, for first place through third.
Keeping the prize in mind helped Falcone cascade through the difficult rowing tasks each round laid out. But the $1,500 wasn’t the only reward she’d gained from competing. She’d brush shoulders with on-the-water rowers, whom she’d really never cross paths with before as an indoor competitor. Age handicaps, extra time handed to competitors older than her, added a new level of challenge.
She broke the American record for women ages 40 to 49 during the second round of competition, having rowed 337 meters in a minute.
Then there was the unexpected social factor. Falcone was technically competing alone, but between working with her coach to train and meeting new people, she really wasn’t.
“We were all in it together,” Falcone said.
Before calling Annapolis his home, Del Sordo’s casual choice to pick up rowing as a high school sport in South Jersey eventually led to him founding two multimillion rowing companies out of West Baltimore.
Through it, Del Sordo made myriad connections in the rowing community, which would come in handy when coronavirus struck. He’d been in Australia studying boat craftmanship when the burden of what the pandemic meant started to drag him down. Within two weeks, rowing competitions collapsed like dominoes.
As he sat around with some fellow members of the rowing community in Australia, Del Sordo came up with a solution.
“A lot of kids lost the chance to compete. … I made the comment, ‘If I’d lost my senior year in high school, I wouldn’t be here today,’ ’’ he said.
During that talk, Del Sordo’s first virtual bracket competition came to be, drawing around 1,400 young rowers from around the nation. It was likely the largest athletic competition at the time and came during a time in which the Olympics, set to take place in Tokyo this summer, would be postponed a year.
Once adult rowers had seen what young athletes were getting to do, several asked Del Sordo if they could do the same. The Annapolis resident started a grassroots campaign, calling every governing body from around the world and every rower he knew, blitzing social media. He reined in sponsors and posted the prize money. Once Del Sordo enlisted one Olympian, several more signed on, too.
By the end, he’d attracted around 400 athletes from 16 nations.
“People needed the chance to compete,” Del Sordo said.
German rower Oliver Zeidler had been stranded in athletic limbo when one of his teammates mentioned the Global Virtual Rowing Challenge to him.
Zeidler swam competitively until 2017, when he decided to retire after missing his shot at the 2016 Olympics. It was a natural transition; his entire family, famously, rowed.
Fresh off a year in which Zeidler snagged gold in both the World and European Rowing Championships, he’d prepared to springboard into Tokyo, until that goal was swept away.
He wrote to Del Sordo, who happily brought the future Olympian on board.
“It was a bit of distraction the first week, where I was completely out of the boat. Then, I just searched for solutions. I found a good solution for me,” Zeidler said.
Zeidler took down two-time Junior Championships gold medalist Clark Dean, 2,051 meters to 1,982, to claim the Men’s Open Championship and $1,500 last Friday.
“I think I am stronger than before the pandemic, toward the Tokyo Olympics, which will hopefully happen next year. I think I will medal there,” Zeidler said.
Jessica Eddie would say she stumbled into the challenge.
Though the three-time Olympian technically retired from the sport four years ago after collecting a silver medal as part of the British women’s eight team at the 2016 Olympics, she started funneling more time than she’d ever had into rowing, hours she’d normally spend working her museum job — that is, until she’d been furloughed.
Through a friend she’d made on the American team back in Rio, Eddie accepted an offer to speak on the Rower’s Choice podcast, which is run by Del Sordo. Soon after, he’d ask her to join his new global challenge he was putting together.
Before she knew it, Eddie was back on a vigorous training schedule with weekly results she’d have to turn in. She’d be back in an international pool, chatting with competitors from other countries again just as if she had remained active for Tokyo after all.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was fun to have that pressure again and perform and put myself out there again,” Eddie said.
She’d flown through the first three rounds before getting “smashed” by a “big, young gun” American named Kendall Chase in the quarterfinals, 1,863 meters to 1,766.
Eddie, 35, bowed to the youth behind her. After all, she was simply pleased to see the sport she’d readily admit can be a somewhat vanilla event spice up.
“They’ve kind of changed rowing by doing it. It’s not something that’s really ever happened in our sport. They took a chance and they did it and they got some real big names and they’re doing extremely well,” Eddie said. “I love seeing that, how well they’re doing, how our sport can do something new and be successful.”