Day 4: How COVID has affected US Rowing Trials #1
As we gear up for finals tomorrow, I wanted to highlight a bit about how COVID has affected trials from the athlete perspective including the story behind an athlete that tested positive.
US Rowing Olympic Trials #1 is the first US Olympic trials event for Tokyo 2020 in 2021. By comparison, US Track and Field trials will be in June 2021; USA Swimming will have two waves of trials in June. According to an email from an athlete representative, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (“USOPC”) “is changing their protocols almost daily.” US Rowing has to follow USOPC guidelines for this US Rowing Olympic trial to be valid.
Lessons from rowing will inform other COVID protocols for Olympic selection.
Lightweight Women in the final
Of the crews lining up for the start of the finals tomorrow, two didn’t exist last year.
In 2020, Reckford and Sechser entered together, as did Nabel and Schmieg. Denison-Johnston was not entered in trials, and Heywood was gearing up to race in her single. Cavallo had yet to team up with Joyce. Last year, Joyce was planning to race her collegiate season.
The postponement created opportunities for new athletes to be here.
Row2k interviewed a few athletes on how the pandemic affected their training. The general theme from those quotes is that it was nearly impossible to repeat a full, intense Olympic year of training. Again. This is what we found as we spoke with an athletes who retired.
COVID fundamentally modified training cycles, peaking, and plans. Boathouses weren’t open. Boston wasn’t back on the water until about May and enacted strict rules about the same household rowing. DC was not open. Philly athletes were indoors through the spring and to row team boats, they had to find access to the Schuylkill outside of the city limits because of COVID regulations. Many rowers obtained lifting equipment for garage setups because they determined it was unsafe to join gyms, and many gyms were not open in the northeast.
Additionally, some athletes across boat classes will be lining up at the start of finals that had gotten COVID in the past year. More power to them.
Start line on Thursday February 25, 2021
A Positive COVID Test Result at Olympic Trials
On Saturday, February 20th, at 10:30 pm, Athlete X sleepily rolled over in her hotel bed and answered a call on her phone.
It was the doctor with US Rowing. “You tested positive for COVID 19 on Friday morning.”
Suddenly she was wide awake.
Before the event, all athletes competing had to submit two COVID PCR* tests. One administered onsite on Friday, February 19th, 72 hours before racing. As for the second test, athletes traveling to Sarasota, FL after February 5th, needed to submit a PCR test in conjunction with their travel. Originally athletes already training in Florida before February 5th would not need to submit a test. That changed in mid-February. They learned they also needed to submit a test 72 hours before Friday’s test.
The first test needed to be received and marked negative in order to be “accredited” to practice on Friday. Both tests needed to be negative for athletes to race.
For athletes already in Florida, US Rowing recommended a COVID testing site. Several athletes went to that site, but their results were not back in time for Friday’s practice, largely because those specimens were routed to a lab in Texas during the winter storms.
So, on Friday, some athletes were accredited to practice on the course, and others were not.
On Saturday, with athlete pushback, US Rowing personally called each athlete who had not received their test results back to ask if they were okay with their competitors practicing on the course while they were not allowed to do so.
Evidently, people were not okay with it. Of the four boat classes racing, the women’s single was the only one who had agreed that it was okay to practice Saturday morning.
For this next series of samples, US Rowing had a representative personally fly the Friday morning samples up to a lab.
When they got the test results on Saturday night, our athlete received her call.
She did not sleep that night. Anecdotally, and with a bit of research to back it up, the most important sleep for an athlete is not the night before the event but the night before the night before. And Athlete X was having none of it.
On Sunday, she was “shocked and feeling terrible on most fronts.” Others expressed a range of responses from a sentiment “this was their responsibility…they should have been more careful” to “the two unfortunate people who did test positive, my deepest sympathies. ”
On Sunday morning, the athlete got two PCR tests. This was also the day that America would pass 500,000 COVID-19 deaths.
And she waited. The day was filled with “emotional chaos.” She felt no symptoms and had been checking her temperature since Friday. That day she made no less than 24 phone calls related to this: the few people she had been in contact with, US Rowing, US Rowing’s doctor, her family, her coach. Based on her metrics of speed and recovery, she was ready. Her taper had been working. 11 and half months prior, she had been here at this regatta when it was canceled in its entirety three days before the race due to the arrival of COVID-19. In the following year, she’d lost her job for a period due to COVID, and a long-term relationship ended. And through it all, she trained. It grounded her in an uncertain time. She got a job, and she dated a bit. And she got faster. She signed up again to race. She followed her training plan and COVID protocols.
Now she might not get to race at all.
By some small miracle of proper systemic coordination, with added pressure from US Rowing, one test result came back from Sarasota Memorial on Sunday night. It was negative. As of 9 pm, “the second one has not processed yet. If it’s also negative. I race at dawn. If it’s positive, I don’t race.”
“I’m having a real sports psychology moment here” she tried to make a joke about it.
The time trial was set to go off at 8 am on Monday. She sat in her car, outside the athlete area, waiting for her other result. Other tests had been batched before hers, but that second PCR test wasn’t coming through.
There was an objective medical follow-up with the labs used initially by US Rowing and the Sarasota Memorial lab regarding their procedures. Each checked out. This individual was convinced that it was a true positive result on Friday and two negative tests on Sunday. This might have to do with viral load detected through PCR.* The athlete might have had a trace amount of viral RNA that made the test positive on Friday, but because she had two negative results 48 hours later, evidently she had not contracted the virus.
Athlete X decided that at 7:50, she would take her car to the start of the race and watch from it.
At 7:40, she got word that her test had cleared: negative. She took off down the hill towards the boat launch. She unstrapped her boat that she hadn’t been allowed to come into contact with. No boat adjustments today. It happened in such a flurry that she didn’t grab her water or her speed coach, a tool used to measure speed output. But she lined up. Her coach saw her at the start, “Oh yay, she made it!” He had no idea how narrow that margin had been for her. How between the start of her race and her sitting in the car into thinking she would not be racing was 20 minutes.
At the start, she was confused. She usually enjoys the first few strokes of a race — on Monday, she had to alert herself: “You’re racing. You’re racing.”
She had a strong first thousand meters. After the 1k, everything wore on her. Her technique slipped. Top 16/35 went onto time trial. She didn’t make it.
She did get her sports psychology moment-thanks to US Rowing and emerging mental health support from the USOPC. She realized that she was overstimulated mentally and understimulated physically without a proper warm-up physically. Mentally she realized she needed psych down. Usually, she’s just “ready”. Some athletes need to psych up before races, others psych down. It is individually specific.
Later she reflected, thinking how much would she have learned from not having things go wrong and theoretically posting a slightly faster time. “Some. How much was I able to learn from this? A whole lot.” It had to do with reassessing mental strategies and techniques to be present for racing and adaptable to where she needs to be physically and mentally in that moment.
*PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. It is a laboratory technique to make 1million-1billion copies of genetic material (in the case of COVID, RNA). Mayo has an in-depth but accessible description here. PCR is most accurate in determining earlier cases. There are thresholds of the genetic material load. It is possible to get an “inconclusive” result if the amount of amplified genetic material hasn’t passed the threshold for positive, but is still somewhat present.