The USA is a powerhouse in rowing. With 89 medals, including 33 gold, they hold the most Olympic medals out of any country.
Despite being less prominent on the men’s podium in the last few Olympic Games, USRowing has developed some very fast boats for the Paris Olympics, especially in the coxless four event.
I was fortunate enough to chat to USRowing’s Justin Best, who is competing in his second Olympics just months after winning gold at World Cup II in the four. He competed at the Tokyo Olympics in the eight.
You’ve raced in lots of different boats – how has it been settling into the four?
It’s going pretty well. In Tokyo, the eight was described as the priority boat for the United States, and afterwards there were some coaching changes in the US system, so I had an opportunity to row a pair, and competed at the 2022 Worlds. I thought we had an okay result – it came down to a semifinal where we came out on the bad end of a pretty fast opening 1k. We won the B final, and it was a really good experience to go from the biggest boat to the smallest boat.
After that World Championships, where there were no men’s medals, we were all looking at each other and we were like okay, so if the priority boat is the four, let’s try to go for that.
Initially, I didn’t make the boat, so I was rowing a pair at the World Cup in 2023 and came fourth. But, I went in again for the four, ended up making it, and have been rowing with that four ever since.
We got silver at the 2023 World Championships, and had a decent margin on bronze. I think it’s made me a better oarsman and changed my mentality of how you can move the boat efficiently.
You took silver at last year’s World Championships, missed World Cup I and then returned to take gold at World Cup II. What changed in that time?
After the World Championships in 2023, there was a collective buy-in we had as a crew. All of a sudden, it started to seem attainable and making the progress in our physiology and our technical blending made it possible.
We spent those months between Worlds doing more training than we ever have before in our careers. Another big change is that we added what we call a ‘bucket’ into the boat, when you have two oars on the same side right next to each other, and it’s good to see that it’s really helped the boat.
We’re doing many, many hundreds of kilometres at this point per week, and I think the bodies are feeling it. But, because of the motivation of the most recent results, we’re all moving in a better way than had we been before.
It’s a really good, positive vibe right now and I think we’re hitting the pace very well.
In rowing, all the training through the winter months builds up to a six-minute race. What would an Olympic medal mean to you?
It’s a culmination of years of laying the fundamentals.
If you’re going to make a technical change, especially at this point in the sport, it takes thousands of metres of rowing – and then there’s building the endurance. That six-minute race is just a representation of the years of 6am wake ups, starting your second workout at 6 pm, and often working full-time. In 2022, I was working 40 hours a week as well as training.
It represents all of that and you hope you do everything correctly so that those six minutes are reflective of all the effort. I don’t want to call them sacrifices because we choose to do this, but there’s a lot of things that all of us have to say no to.
If you start cutting corners, that’s when you start seeing the slip, and other people who are willing to put in that extra work, that’s when they take seats on you. It really represents how you build your life around the sport.
If you have a good result, saying you feel excited it an understatement – there’s really no way to put it all into words.
Can you talk about how training this hard has affected you, and the sacrifices you’ve made because of it?
One of my best friends in college just got married and I couldn’t go because I was racing. You miss birthdays, weddings, social events; you have to say no, I’ve got to go train.
If you want to do higher education, you put that on the line. I’ve been dating the same girl for nine years – I do hope to eventually get married to her, and it postpones those types of things.
One thing about rowing too – it saps your energy so for the rest of the day, you’re not operating at 100%, while someone else would be. After a really tough workout, for the next six hours I feel like I’m operating with 80% of my brain capacity. But you put in the work to do that, and you surround yourself with people that give you energy, and at the end of the day it’ll hopefully all be worth it.
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