Women's Champ Eights: Collegians Best Olympians

More rust than gold in Canadian Olympic boat on Sunday.

On paper, it was gold medalist Canada that looked to be a heavy favorite against a field of college crews in Sunday’s Women’s Championship Eights race. On the water, however, it was the college crews who were golden. The Olympians, who had not rowed together since Tokyo, finished in sixth place, 28 seconds behind the winning Stanford boat, and also behind, Princeton, Brown, and two Yale boats.

Starting in the first bow postion, Stanford held their spot at the front of the field for the entire three miles, finishing in a time of 15:41, just over six seconds ahead of the Princeton Tigers.

Senior Azja Czajkowski, who sat in the four seat in the winner’s boat, praised the Cardinal coxswain for managing the race.

“I think that we definitely just approached this knowing that this was going to be chaotic, we had a ‘we’re just going to embrace the chaos’ kind of mindset,” Czajkowski said. “We have a lot of trust in our coxswain, [Grace] Kelly rated basically the entire course beforehand, and we took some practice rows so we felt confident.”

Czajkowski was not only grateful to be able to win the race but as well to just be around rowers again.

“It’s really fun to be back,” Czajkowski said. “It definitely feels real again, last year even though it was an abridged season it was a really cool experience and I’m really looking forward to this year after that.”

And the racing, Czajkowski is not the first to point out, it just a part of the Head of the Charles experience.

“Being here, around the high school team that I coached for over the summer and seeing my past coaches and everything and all these other teams, it’s so fun and I’m just so excited to be a part of it all,” she said.