Hello Alumni,
Just minutes ago, Jordan Smith became the 4th Georgia Tech Crew alumni (and first Heavyweight) to make the US National Team. Jordan has been training at Penn AC for the past year and made his charge for this year's Worlds in Gifu, Japan in the Pair with cox. Incidently, this is the same event that UTC alum Dan Beery rowed in the year before making the 8+ in last year's Olympics. In order to qualify for the event, Jordan and partners had to win to finals and meet a time standard.
Their first final saw a 4 second advantage over second place, yesterday's final was a closer race with a 1 second advantage. Unfortunately through the first two races, the conditions were not so favorable for meeting the time standard which meant they had through Wednesday to hit it. This morning, they rowed at a base 37, took a bunch of 20s, and pulled a 7:04.741 to beat the standard by .259 seconds and secure the right to represent the United States in Japan next month. Please join me in congratulating Jordan for this huge accomplishment.
I'll pass along more updates as I get them...
Ethan