Yale grad Wagner heading to Olympics in double sculls
After her senior year at Yale, Kristi Wagner thought maybe she was all done with rowing.
Six years later, Wagner is heading to the Olympics.
Wagner, a 2015 Yale graduate who started rowing as a freshman in high school, qualified in the double sculls April 15 at the U.S. Olympic trials in New Jersey with Gevvie Stone, a two-time Olympian and 2016 silver medalist in the single sculls. The Olympic rowing competition begins July 23 in Tokyo.
“I was excited,” said Wagner, 28, of Weston, Mass. “We both were. A little relief. It’s very much not the end of the journey; there’s still a lot of work to do. It’s one step of the way done and we felt good about accomplishing that.”
The two had raced against each other at the Olympic trials in the single sculls in late February in Florida; Stone was second and Wagner third and neither qualified. After the race, Wagner’s coach called Stone’s coach (her dad, Gregg Stone) and asked if Wagner could train with Stone and a group of other top rowers in Boston. Gregg said yes. They rowed together for three weeks.
“If they hadn’t won the double trials, I should be fired because I had No. 2 and 3 in the singles trials,” Gregg Stone said. “That shouldn’t necessarily always work but it’s a good head start.”
Wagner decided to get back into rowing after getting a job
and moving to Boston. She rowed and worked for a year, then decided to see if she could row full-time.
So she did, moving to Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to work for and train with a rowing club she had belonged to in high school.
“I would say the biggest thing to describe her career is resilience and grit,” said Eric Catalano, the executive director of ARION (Advanced Rowing Initiative of the Northeast), the elite level program in Saratoga, who has coached Wagner for the last five years.
“She’s had more setbacks and challenges and hurdles and obstacles. Even going back to high school — training really hard for a full summer, going above and beyond what normal high school rowers do and then showing up at the race and having her boat break.”
It was at the Canadian Henley competition.
Wagner was a junior in high school and rowed in pairs, in which each rower has one oar (sculling is with two oars).
“She and her pair partner went to the Canadian Henley, the biggest domestic race there is in the summer,” Catalano said. “They’re leading the race easily, about to go on and win by a big margin. And their boat breaks in the middle of the race and they can’t finish it.”
But they returned the next year and won the race.
Wagner, who is 6 feet 1, played a lot of sports growing up but the only ones that really clicked were basketball and rowing, which she started in ninth grade.
“At first I just liked that I had friends on the team and it was something fun to do after school every day but then I actually really started to like rowing,” she said. “I haven’t stopped since.”
At Yale, Wagner was part of the varsity four that finished second at the NCAA championships in a race that was so close, nobody knew who won.
“It’s an awesome race to watch on video but in the race, it didn’t feel that crazy,” Wagner said. “It was exciting and I knew it was the last race of my college career.
“We were all sitting there at the finish line waiting for someone to tell us [who won].”
Wagner is the sixth Olympian Yale’s Will Porter has coached.
“She really made the most of her talent and stuck with it after college,” Porter said. “The potential was there, but her path was probably longer than the others. I admire what she’s done so much because she has worked so hard for it.”
What Gregg Stone, a former Olympic rower, liked about Wagner, who had never been a member of the senior national team — besides her breakout year this spring — was that her size and body type matched his daughter’s, as well as her attitude.
“It’s really great to have doubles where the people match up size-wise. Some of the great doubles pairs in history have been twins or sisters,” Stone said. “We don’t have that, but we have a good physical match.
“What she also brought was a tremendous attitude. She’s mature as an athlete. She’s easy to get along with. That’s important. These women are going to be glued at the hip, they have to get along. Things are going to go wrong and they have to be able to communicate that to each other.”
For her part, Wagner is looking forward to working with an Olympian.
“It’s awesome,” she said. “She’s super accomplished and a really good rower. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn from her but also add in what I can offer. I’ve really enjoyed it.”