THE SPORT OF ROWING incredible athlete. Joan Lind is one of the most amazing people I have met in her ability to achieve physical goals, but Carol was right dead even with Joan in terms of athletic gifts. In some cases, she could jump farther and longer and was such a strong person, but she ended up not competing for Long Beach. “Before the quad in 1972, she had been in one of the first U.S. women’s crews to compete in Europe, a Lake Washington eight that competed at the European Championships in Klagenfurt in 1969. “She was later a cofounder of the women’s program at Cal.”5835 A First in 1973 In 1973, Joan won the U.S. singles title, and in the heats at the European Championships in Moscow she made it through to the final.5836 This was the very first international championship final for which a U.S. woman had ever qualified. McCloskey teamed with Pierson in the doubles at the same regatta. John Van Blom and Joan became a couple after Joan returned from the 1974 Worlds. As I write this, they have been married more than twenty years. By 1976, the U.S. Olympic Women’s Single, Double and Quad all came from amongst the homegrown athletes and those who migrated to Long Beach to train under Tom and try out for the team. Long Beach continued to dominate the country through 1980, and this was American women sculling’s finest hour, fully competitive with the international powers of the era, Romania, Soviet Union and GDR. Tom McKibbon, Coach Van Blom: “Tom was the person who gave credibility to coaching women in the United States. He really got elite women’s rowing going here. “I think after Tom did so well with women, Harry Parker decided, ‘Hey, this has some promise!’ and that got him started.5837 I never asked Harry about this, but I really feel that Tom was the first coach to allow women’s rowing in the United States to be respected. “Tom used to take people out individually in doubles in the afternoons and spend hours and hours with them on technique, or just rowing with them in a wherry or something. “He spent so much time on technique, a lot of time on the catch, talking to them in the boathouse. He really spent a lot of one- on-one time with people. He often coached by watching from a distance and then talking to them about what they were doing after they came in rather than being on top of them with the launch the whole time.”5838 McKibbon: “As a coach, I kept doing everything I could to learn from others. I never went to a regatta without a tie because I remembered George Pocock saying, ‘When you walk into a room, let them know you’re somebody. Dress up.’ “What a great guy he was! Great speaker. “Dr. Henk van der Meer, the Dutch coach that helped us rig our boat in 1969,5839 was a doctor and a great guy, and I learned a lot from him. After we became friends in Klagenfurt, we went to the Bosbaan a few times, and he took us to all these windmills 5835 McKibbon, op. cit. 5836 See Chapter 128. 5837 See Chapter 128. 5838 Van Blom, personal conversation, 2007 5839 See Chapter 88. 1630
