After leaving the sport, 31-year-old will compete in Beijing
After the Summer Olympics in Athens in 2004, Josh West told the Journal, “I was totally shattered and totally disappointed and a complete wreck.”
West, who was born and raised in Santa Fe and attended Santa Fe Prep, was a member of Great Britain’s eight-man rowing team, which finished a disappointing ninth in the Olympics.
He laughed this week when reminded of the quote. After that summer, West said, he took more than six months off from the sport.
He found that he missed it.
“I got back into it and really enjoyed it,” he said. “I took the attitude that as long I’m really enjoying myself, it makes it easy to commit to this team.”
“This team” is once again the eight-man rowing squad representing Great Britain at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. West, 31, can compete for England because his father was born there.
The training has been arduous. West said he’s in the final phase of preparation for the Olympics that began in 2005. Back in England after three weeks of high-altitude work in Austria, each of West’s days includes between four and five hours on the water and an hour of weight lifting.
“The last few weeks, we’ve been doing some long training miles,” West said. “At this point, we’re fine tuning.”
His globe-trotting journey with the sport started in college at Yale. West had never rowed when a Yale coach caught a glimpse of his stature and recruited him.
“He was 6-foot-8 and 180 pounds,” said Justin Moore, who coached West on Yale’s freshman team. “He was an absolute beanpole.”
Moore knew height — West would grow another inch — is a tremendous advantage in rowing. The longer an oar is pulled through the water, generating force, the faster a boat can slice toward the finish line. Reach is key.
Also, Moore said, “Josh’s aerobic capacity is amazing. I think part of it was the eleva- tion he lived at when he was in Santa Fe. For someone who grows up at that level and moves to sea level, his oxygen capacity is high. It was a wonderful combination of his length and tremendous oxygen-using capacity.”
West rowed on freshman and junior varsity teams early in his career at Yale, turning in solid but not exceptional performances. Then, between his junior and senior seasons, he had a benign tumor removed from behind his left knee. After that, his career blossomed.
“He went from pretty good to very good,” Moore said. “That’s when he really took off.”
Every stroke in rowing is like a full squat. With the tumor in his leg, each bend of West’s knees pushed his calf and shin bone in unnatural directions. He couldn’t maximize his potential in the sport until the growth was sawed away.
“It made a massive difference,” West said. “It allowed me to be a proper rower, where I was inhibited before.”
Yale would still fall to Harvard that season in a traditional race dating back more than 150 years.
West graduated, relocating across the pond to Cambridge University for graduate school.
He thought he was done with rowing and was content to study geology at one of the world’s foremost universities. Really, though, he’d stepped up to the big leagues.
“It’s slightly different in Britain,” West said. “The annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge is a big national sporting event. That obviously brings more consciousness to rowing.
“Relative to the U.S., there are fewer sports where we’ve had success. Rowing has been one of those sports. We’ve had a high proportion of gold medals, and that brings attention.”
In the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, Sir Steve Redgrave won a gold medal in rowing for the fifth consecutive Olympics. No British Olympian has ever matched that success.
So West certainly wasn’t a shoo-in to become one of the country’s top rowers.
“Josh went to Cambridge for academic purposes,” Moore said. “A lot of guys go there on a ‘rowgram’ just to row. It’s very unusual that a guy can go for academic reasons and make one of those boats.”
He made the boat and caught the eye of the national team. And since 2002, West and British rowing have been staples on the medal stands at the World Championships. The team’s bronze at the World Championships in Munich in September 2007 clinched it a berth in Beijing. Last month, at the Rowing World Cup in Poznan, Poland, Britain won gold in the Men’s Eight, edging Germany.
Heading into Beijing, West said the only team he hasn’t met in competition is the United States.
“I think we’ve got the potential to be really successful,” he said. “We’re racing for the gold medal.”
Beijing also gives West an opportunity to atone for that disappointing showing in Athens.
“I definitely want to turn around that result this year,” West said. “There’s an element that looks back and sees that (Athens) as another log to add to the fire.”
