THE SPORT OF ROWING Red Rose Crew. In 1976, she was 6 in the Olympic Bronze Medal Camp Eight.7748 After graduating from Wisconsin, Graves kept on competing. In 1979, she stroked the World Fifth-Place Coxless-Pair with fellow-Badger and ‘76 U.S. teammate Peggy McCarthy. In 1980, Carie was again 6-seat in the U.S. Camp Eight, made up mostly of a new generation of woman athletes. They were denied the opportunity to compete in Moscow by the U.S. Olympic boycott. After 1980, Carie was one of only a handful of American women who dedicated themselves to train for a third Olympics, but training was not her only pursuit. She had also been coaching the Radcliffe crew since 1977 and would receive her Master’s of Education in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard in 1985. In 1981 and 1983, Carie and her teammates in the U.S. Eight won Silver to go along with her Silver Medal from 1975. She was the only member left from the Red Rose Crew, and by 1984 the years were beginning to take their toll. Carie: “By that Olympic summer, I felt as if I was no longer on top of it and couldn’t get there anymore. The harder I tried and the harder I rowed, the worse I got, and let me make this clear – I did not have this experience for my other two Olympic eights. “In ‘84, I felt old and worn out and was not recovering enough between workouts prior to boat selection. Jeanne Flanagan (5- seat) and I had come dead last (way back) in the pair racing at Princeton prior to selection, so it was clear to me that it wasn’t going well for me. “I felt that Bob wanted me in there, but for the first time in my rowing career I felt guilty and undeserving that I was in the boat. I wasn’t given the chance to prove myself, but I felt that if I had been given the 7748 See Chapter 128. chance, I wouldn’t have won my seat races and would not have been in the eight. “I certainly welcomed the long taper prior the Games! “At our 20th Reunion in Seattle a couple of years ago, we were all sitting in the Pocock Boathouse at a big round table, and I shared this memory with the team. I was very honest and got it off my chest. After I finished, they sat there and stared at me with jaws agape, shocked. Apparently no one else had felt that way!”7749 Thorsness: “I recall that Carie was so inflexible at the beginning of that summer that she could not touch her knees, let alone her toes. Bob made us all do this pre- practice stretching routine, and by the end of the summer, Carie could touch her toes (just barely). “We didn’t care. Even half of Carie’s stroke was a whole lot of power.”7750 The Race Ernst said there was little strategy to the Olympic final: “The women race 1,000 meters in international competition.7751 We’re not going to make any tactical error because we don’t have any tactics. There’s no such thing as playing defense in a 1,000 meter race. It’s all straight offense. The only kind of strategy that you can possibly have in 1,000 meter races is to get from the 7749 Graves, personal correspondence, 2006 7750 Thorsness, op. cit. 7751 It was increased to 2,000 meters in 1985. 2160
