To continue reading…
This article is exclusively for Rowing News subscribers. For as little as $5 a month, you can get access to the best quality, independent reporting on all the issues that matter to the North American rowing community.
By Martin Cross
I had no idea it would be the last time I would see him alive. It was June 28, 2026. Lucerne’s Rotsee Lake looked stunning. The World Rowing Cup finals were just about to start. Waiting to lead the Norwegian team in their dramatic Viking row celebrations that had characterised their soccer team’s World Cup run was Olaf Tufte: a rowing legend.
The 50-year-old, his head adorned with his distinctive white baseball cap, called over to me, “Come row with us, Crossy. We need you here.” I was seconds away from starting TV commentary; there seemed no time. But then something—an impulse from the heart— compelled me to leave the microphone and headphones.
When a living legend, a man who changed the face of rowing, calls you…
I ran down to the medal pontoon and rowed my heart out, with Tufte leading us with his dramatic drum beat. We finished and I ran back to my commentary position, without another look at Olaf.
Just over three weeks later, he had passed. At 3 p.m. on July 21 Olaf was found unconscious at Tufte Gård, his farm in Norway. And, as his family’s press release explained, health personnel arrived quickly. Tufte was flown to a hospital in Oslo. But his life could not be saved. There were no witnesses to the incident and no suspicion of an occupational accident.
The news echoed around the world. Its impact was shocking and at once visceral. “I’m speechless. I’m devastated,” said World Rowing president Jean-Christophe Rolland. Iztok Cop, Tufte’s great rival and close friend, said on Instagram, “I still can’t breathe normally since the news hit me.” Jonas Gahr Støre, the prime-minister of Norway, felt compelled to offer his: ‘deepest condolences to his family and those close to him.’
I could not claim to be close to him, but loved him nonetheless. And in a way, I felt loved back by Olaf. He had once said, “If you pull on an oar, you’re a rower and part of my family.”
Three weeks ago, we were together in Lucerne for a meeting of the Thomas Keller medal committee and the presentation of the 2025 medal to Ondrej Synek, another member of that incredible group of single scullers from the 2000s who raced each other to exhaustion then partied the night away, with memories to last a lifetime.
The Keller medal is rowing’s highest honor. Tufte had been awarded it in 2021 and been asked to join the committee a couple of years later. Now, when the Keller committee talks about potential winners, you might guess that we spend our time talking about Olympic and world titles won, great races and technical mastery. And to be sure, that’s part of our discussions.
For the record, Olaf won back-to-back Olympic gold medals in the single in 2004 and 2008 and two world singles titles in 2001 and 2003. From Atlanta to Tokyo, he competed in seven—yes, seven—Olympic Games. He won a silver medal in the double in the Sydney Olympics. Sixteen years later he won a bronze in the double in Rio. He sometimes seemed almost immortal.
I guess those palmarès make it look like Tufte was a ‘shoo-in’ for the Keller medal. And maybe he was. But a person’s competitive record is never the most important thing the Keller committee discusses. And that’s how it was when we talked about Olaf.
He knew how to lose as much as he knew how to win. How could he be otherwise, when he had forged such close relationships with his rivals? It was his relationship with Iztok Cop that kickstarted a deeper camaraderie between rivals than had been seen in our sport for many a year.
The Slovenian had won the double sculls Olympic gold to Olaf’s silver in Sydney. Their rivalry and friendship only grew over the years ahead. The depth of that bond was shown when Cop asked Tufte to be the best man at his wedding.
It was their relationship, a way of being in the sport, that drew their fellow competitors in the single ever closer. Mahé Drysdale, Ondrej Synek, Alan Campbell, Lassi Karonen, Marcel Hacker—and more—became indelibly linked.
It was the Great Eight, in which these top scullers came together to compete against sweep rowers in the Head of the River Race and the Head of the Charles, that symbolized Tufte’s friendship with his rivals. And these relationships went far beyond the rowing courses. The great Kiwi two-time Olympic singles champion, Mahé Drysdale, was just one of the scullers who came to visit Tufte Gård in Norway to experience Olaf’s unique training methods.
Drysdale and many of Tufte’s other competitors engaged in cross-country skiing, dragging trees, chopping wood with an axe, and running with sacks of grain on their backs.
For Tufte, life was always about more than rowing. “If I only focused on rowing, that wouldn’t be a life,” he once said. So he had always run his family’s farm. Even more impressively, he ran a number of businesses, too. His successful clothing company not only raised his profile in Norway but also raised rowing’s profile and drew more people to the sport.
In 2008 he founded Team Tufte, an organisation dedicated to helping young athletes progress. He was a mentor to many rowers. Luca Rambaldi, the 2025 Italian world champion quad sculler, spoke of how in 2022 Olaf had helped him when Rambaldi, now 31, seemd to have lost his way.
“My friend you have so much rowing in you. Keep fighting for what you believe in. If you ever need anything to get back on your tracks. I will support you,” wrote Tufte.
His family will of course feel his loss most deeply, especially his wife Aina and their two children, Herman and Mie. Right now, it seems unbelievable that life will carry on without him. We have lost a man with an apparently inexhaustible energy, a wicked sense of humor, an infectious enthusiasm, and a deep, deep sense of shared humanity.
I am privileged to have known Olaf, to commentate on his races, to talk about the world’s greatest rowers in his company, and to share beers with him—at Mr. Pickwick Pub, where rowers throng to share stories, post-racing—by the side of the River Reuss, in Lucerne. Olaf, you know that whenever rowers gather there, stories about your life, races, and friendships will be told.
Right now, I am so pleased that when Olaf did call me, three weeks ago in Lucerne, I said, ‘Yes’.
