What does it feel like to have an Olympic gold medal placed around your neck?
“It’s a little bit heavy,” admits rower Tessa Gobbo.
Gobbo, who was born in Keene and raised in Chesterfield, was part of the eight-woman team that rowed to victory in the 2016 Rio Olympics. She came to the Dublin Community Center on Saturday to talk about her experiences as a dedicated athlete who realized her goal of performing on the Olympic level.
Gobbo found rowing at the age of 15, and never looked back, she said, even when things were tough. And things did sometimes get tough, she said.
“It’s physically exhausting and mentally horrible,” she said. “The highs and lows are really big, and the highs are few and far between.”
Gobbo rowed for Brown University in college, (where she majored in sociology – but really rowing, she joked) and trained at the Princeton Training Center, where the athletes for the Olympic rowing teams are selected from. She was one of over 30 women with the potential to make the team, said Gobbo, and she knows that at the end of the day, she’s lucky to have been able to sit in the boat that crossed the finish line.
“I realize I was really lucky to be healthy for the whole year,” said Gobbo.
Though, she added, she had been trained under some old-school style coaches that didn’t accept any excuses.
“Injury was not a thing,” said Gobbo. “You just had to be tough. And if you lost a race, it was because you weren’t tough enough.”
The strategy going into the Olympics was a simple one, said Gobbo – to be the strongest team out there. The U.S. team kept a consistent pace, initially falling behind some of the other teams, but pulling ahead in the second half. And she didn’t do it alone, said Gobbo.
“You’re only as fast as your weakest link,” said Gobbo. “It does take a lot of endurance, and you can’t give up, because you have to keep doing the same thing at the same time as everyone else.”
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 and asaari@ledgertranscript.com.