High Aims and High Costs

USRowing aims to win at least six medals at the LA Olympics and Paralympics in 2028.

So declares USRowing’s High Performance Plan 2025-2028, in which the national governing body calls for three to four medals— including one gold—in classic flat-water rowing and one medal each in Beach Sprints and Paralympic rowing.

Missing from the 28-page plan is how USRowing will pay for its ambitions, which are projected to result in a deficit for the Olympic quadrennial of $17 million—the target amount for USRowing’s fundraising.

“We’re proud and excited to roll out this high-performance plan for LA2028,” said Amanda Kraus, CEO of USRowing, who called it “a vision for an elite, sustainable program.”

“This roadmap provides a clear path forward for our athletes, coaches, supporters, and fans,” she added.

Unclear is who will execute the plan. Four of the 13 positions in the staff-structure diagram are labeled “TBD,” with a fifth calling for “Independent Contractors.”

Chief High Performance Officer Josy Verdonkschot, the plan’s lead author, remains at the top, with full-time men’s and women’s head coaches Casey Galvanek and Jesse Foglia supported by operations staffers Will Daly and Wendy Wilbur.

The coaches of the West Coast training center and high-performance sculling and coastal rowing will be decided in 2025, and Brett Gorman, the director of High-Performance Pathways, will get a talent coach in 2026, according to the document.

With fewer than a dozen athletes combined training full-time at the Mercer and Sarasota training centers at the end of last year, the U.S. National Team has yet to get started on the road to LA2028, America’s first home Summer Games since Atlanta 1996, when U.S. crews won four medals.

With the elimination of lightweight events and the addition of Beach Sprints, current plans call for 12 traditional flat-water rowing events (now termed “classic” by World Rowing) on the shortened 1,500-meter Long Beach course and three Beach Sprint events at a venue yet to be named.

In March, the international governing bodies of rowing will gather for World Rowing’s 2025 Quadrennial Congress in Lausanne, where more events are expected to be eliminated from the World Rowing Championships and more changes made to the Olympic program.

At the Paris 2024 Games, three countries—The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Romania—won nine of the 14 events. U.S. men did well in big-boat sweep rowing, winning gold in the four and bronze in the eight. But U.S. women and scullers were shut out of the medals for the second consecutive Olympics; at the preceding Tokyo Games, the U.S. failed to win a single medal in any event.

From 2007 through 2016, the U.S. women’s eight won every World Rowing Cup, World Rowing Championship, and Olympics they raced. But since 2019, USRowing hasn’t won gold in a single event of the 29 contested at every regular senior World Rowing Championships. If U.S. rowers can achieve the LA2028 goal of four Olympic medals, they will equal the 1996 Atlanta record, and exceed it by winning gold.

Much of the plan is about continuing to build on the system installed by Verdonkschot leading up to Paris 2024. Larger permanent facilities have been envisioned for years at the training centers in Sarasota and at Mercer Lake in West Windsor, N.J., but construction has yet to begin.

Paralympic rowers train part-time in Boston from existing boathouses, including Community Rowing’s Harry Parker Boathouse under six-year Para head coach Ellen Minzner. The USRowing plan calls Chula Vista “ideal” for a West Coast training center and states that making a final decision and starting work on the new center this year is “a priority.”

Verdonkschot’s program relies heavily on clubs like California Rowing Club to serve as the training homes of athletes when they’re not on trips or at U.S. National Team camps. Three of the four gold medalists from the Paris four trained at CRC, as did most of the bronze-medal eight, which prepared in Seattle under Washington coach Michael Callahan for the last-chance Olympic qualifier in Lucerne two months before the Games.

In the lead-up to Paris, Verdonkschot worked cooperatively and successfully with clubs such as ARION, Craftsbury Green Racing Project, and New York Athletic Club, and the USRowing plan advocates continuing to use this “hybrid structure.”

Much of the unmet cost of the plan comes from athlete stipends, which reached $1 million dollars in 2024. For the LA2028 quadrennial, Verdonkschot’s proposal retains the previous training stipend of $1,000 per month and adds a higher “performance” stipend of $2,500 per month for 2025, which increases to $3,000 in 2026 and $3,500 in 2027 and 2028.

Aligning Olympic and Paralympic stipends, and projecting the same relative number of recipients, the cost of athlete stipends will rise to over $1.5 million dollars in 2027 and 2028, the plan estimates.

“It’s not a fundraising document,” said Verdonkschot. “But you can’t write a plan without considering budget implications. And then just do the math.”

Even with the proposed increased spending for Olympic preparation, USRowing lags behind the support leading Olympic nations Great Britain and The Netherlands provide their Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

Reported figures of $30 million and $5 million for Great Britain’s Olympic and Paralympic rowers, respectively, don’t tell the whole story, since British athletes, like most of Team USA’s competitors, benefit from government health-care funding, as well as existing training centers and lower travel costs to training and racing venues.

Verdonkschot and his fellow coaches are behind their international peers also in compensation. Earlier this century, when the U.S. women were on their historic winning streak and the men’s eight won gold in 2004 in Athens and bronze in 2008 in Beijing, both the women’s head coach, Tom Terhaar, and men’s head coach, Mike Teti, each were paid more than USRowing’s then CEO, Glenn Merry. In 2015, all of the top-five highest-paid non-officer employees of USRowing had coaching roles, and three of the coaches were paid more than the CEO.

That’s been reversed. USRowing’s 2023 tax returns (the most recent available) show that Verdonkschot was paid $227,191 and CEO Amanda Kraus $289,224. Of the other five highest-paid USRowing employees in 2023, none had a coaching role.

USRowing supplemented the grants made by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee by $300,000 in 2024 and intends to more than double that additional annual support for Olympic hopefuls in the run-up to LA2028, the plan says.

Where that money will come from remains to be seen.