Image Credit: World Rowing
How do you define greatness? A mind-bending feat that surpasses expectation and rationality? A moment of authentic surprise that inverts the weight of pressing odds? Or perhaps an incision in the linear unfurling of your heart?
In sport, we are quick to anoint greatness upon each other. A performance that impresses us is often bestowed the virtue of greatness before it can even truly be understood. It is easy to attach brilliance onto bravery and boldness but sometimes the two should not be conflated. True greatness should combine mastery, magnanimity and more than a hint of magic.
The Olympic Games is our ultimate magic show. A procession of truly elite talent, operating at the pinnacle of their sport and thrust forward into a limelight fostered by four years of relative translucency. These two weeks are stitched into the very fabric of competition, dating back to the lore of Ancient Greece, and have transcended the politics of modern society to become the ultimate marker in sporting excellence. To win Olympic Gold gives you immortality of a rare and timeless specification – your story will be perpetuated forevermore, carried forward by the whispers of generations to come, who too aim to climb those sacred steps and join this club of champions. Emerging over the horizon, this time in the blue and red hue of palatial Paris, we are ready for the very fastest in rowing to be crowned.
Step forward, my friends – The Olympic Games have come.
The Stats
Country
Netherlands
Crew
Simon Van Dorp
Age
27 years
Olympic Record
Fifth in the M8+ at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics Games
2024 Competitive Record
2024 World Rowing Cup 1: 2nd
2024 World Rowing Cup 2: 1st
2024 World Rowing Cup 3: N/A
2024 European Championships: N/A
Other: N/A
The Profile
The Dutch have been the thorn in Zeidler’s side for the past couple of seasons. A Dutchman was the only one to beat the German last season (Lennart Van Lierop at the Europeans) and this season another Dutchman, Simon Van Dorp, is the only one to have pushed the world champion off the top step of the podium (alright, I know World Rowing doesn’t use podiums, but you know what I mean). Van Dorp is part of a truly outstanding Dutch men’s sculling squad, all of whom stand chances of winning big medals in Paris. He’s also slightly unusual in that he came to sculling from sweep. A graduate of the University of Washington, he spent the majority of his international career as part of the Netherlands men’s eight. He won U23 world gold in 2016 and 2017 and was in the senior eight for the rest of the Tokyo Olympiad, winning a silver medal at the 2019 Worlds and then finishing fifth at the Olympics. He switched to the sculling team post-Tokyo and was part of the quad that finished fourth in 2022. He really made his mark on the sculling stage in 2023 when, perhaps surprisingly, he was selected as the single for the world championships. Even more surprisingly, in his first international single competition, he won the silver medal behind Zeidler. This season, he has again shown he is a real challenger to Zeidler, finishing second behind the German at the opening 2024 World Rowing Cup and then overhauling him in Lucerne to take the win by almost a second. If Van Dorp does take the gold, it’ll be the Netherlands first Olympic men’s single title since Jan Wienese won in Mexico in 1968 (indeed, that is so far the Netherlands’ one and only Olympic M1X medal).
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