How Olympic Athletes are Made in Saratoga Springs
Lauren O’Connor competes in the women’s quadruple sculls B final at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Photo via US Rowing.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Imagine being separated from your home and family for 260 days of the year. Imagine waking up at 5:15 a.m., having hard physical labor from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., working from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., enduring more physical labor from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., then more work from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Then you sleep, wake up, and do it all over again — hundreds of times. Your compensation for much of this work is exactly $0.00.
This might sound like the brutal conditions of some foreign prison camp, but it’s just a day in the life of Saratoga rowers hoping to make it to the world stage. Their grueling but wildly successful training regimen has resulted in three appearances in the Olympics, multiple stints in the World Championships, and participation in the PanAm games, with a World Cup and more international events tossed in for good measure.
Despite all the hardship necessary to become an elite rower, the rewards can be extraordinary. Lauren O’Connor, one of nine members of Saratoga’s Advanced Rowing Initiative of the Northeast (ARION) program, made her Olympics debut at the 2024 games in Paris.
“We sat and watched men’s gymnastics with Simone [Biles] and Jordan Chiles and they were explaining men’s gymnastics to us,” O’Connor said during an event at the Saratoga Springs Public Library earlier this month. “[We sat] with the entire women’s rugby team as they’re just watching their sport being played. It was very cool to get that information from the person that is literally the best in the world at it.”
“It’s kind of crazy to think about, in this mile-and-a-half-square little village, there’s the accumulation of the world’s best athletes,” added ARION Coach Eric “Cat” Catalano.
O’Connor and fellow Saratoga rower Kristi Wagner (who was also at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo) both finished ninth overall in their respective events in Paris. Wagner and her partner Sophia Vitas finished ninth in double sculls, while O’Connor was ninth in the quadruple sculls. Wagner and Vitas previously placed fifth in double sculls in Tokyo. At the end of September, both O’Connor and Wagner were invited to the White House to celebrate their achievements.
To prepare for her first Olympics, O’Connor said she spent about 85% of her time from November 2023 until September 2024 living in hotel rooms as she traveled the globe training and competing.
“If you didn’t qualify at the World Championships the year before, you then have to qualify at the final Olympic qualification regatta, which is always in Lucerne, Switzerland in May,” O’Connor said. “So you have to qualify in May and then the Olympics are at the end of July. You have to peak twice within a very short amount of time…That’s probably the most amount of racing you will do in such a short amount of time ever in our sport.”
O’Connor’s (and Wagner’s) long journey to the world stage, where they compete against the most talented athletes alive, began in Saratoga Springs.
“Olympians are being made here,” said Catalano. “These guys are pretty amazing athletes. It amazes me. I was thinking, how can I explain what these guys do. This morning, we just had a 20K row, which is about a half-marathon, and that was the morning practice. That was about an average morning practice, and then they do something similar in the afternoon. I was thinking, I’m a casual runner and when I get geared up for a half-marathon, it’s like [for them] that’s just morning, and then they have breakfast.”
Catalano, who assisted the US team at the 2023 World Championships, began coaching at the Saratoga Rowing Association in 1998. After a brief stint at Harvard/Radcliffe, he returned to Saratoga as the association’s executive director and head coach. In 2016, following the Olympic Trials, he launched the ARION program.
The program’s facilities include both a boathouse and a training center located in Saratoga Springs. Outside of the winter months, rowing is done in Fish Creek and on Saratoga Lake. Those interested in applying to or donating to ARION can visit arion.saratogarowing.com.
