U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Team Trials kick off in Sarasota this week
SARASOTA, Fla. (WFLA) — Athletes from across the United States have given it their all the last four months to qualify for the 2024 Olympic Summer Games in Paris.
Twenty-one athletes will be competing this week, and come Sunday, five of them will be packing their bags to go to Paris. The rest will have to go to compete in the qualifier in Switzerland in May.
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“It’s been, you know, a long lead-up to this. So I think in an Olympic year, not even a little Olympic year and an entire four-year cycle, there’s so many checkpoints you have to hit just to get here,” rower Teal Cohen said.
“We had to do winter speed order, which was a couple weeks ago here, and then it’s like, Okay, now we have to go through three weeks of selection for the boat. Okay, now we’ve made the boat, now we have to win trials against guys who almost made the boat,” rower Will Legenzowski said.
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“It’s not about the result. It’s all about the trip. It’s to travel from here to there. And so being here, being able to witness, I can consider myself to be like a companion. It’s their dream. And I’m just here to help them fulfill that dream,” Chief High-Performance Officer of US Rowing, Josy Verdonkschot, said.
“Josy has been a really great influence coming into the cycle, and I think everybody’s kind of committed to the changes is he what he’s wanted, and kind of just trying to work together and believing in this in the program that we have now,” Venice, Florida-native and rower, Andrew LeRoux, said.
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