RIO DE JANEIRO _ The weather was perfect. For everything but rowing.
Standing in the rowing venue Sunday morning, I was blown away by the beauty. The bright blue sky. The temperature in the mid-80s. The picturesque setting. And Counting Crows blaring from the sound system.
Above it all, Christ the Redeemer loomed in the distance.
Simply breathtaking.
But the rowing event was canceled due to strong winds causing technical problems.
During the rowing Saturday, the winds were so bad that a Serbian men's pair flipped during a race. USRowing sent out a press release that called the conditions a "rowing nightmare" and said the water was so bad, it looked like "rowing on the ocean."
The weather has already messed up at least one rower from Michigan.
Ellen Tomek, who is from Flushing, Mich., was in a boat with Meghan O'Leary on Saturday. They were in second place _ and in perfect position to qualify _ until they got smacked by the nasty conditions. The wind and weather messed up their stroke and they went out of their lane. They took fourth. They could still qualify for the finals, in a second-chance race, if the weather ever cooperates.
"We just wanted to go out there and have the best race that we could and throw down a really good time, and unfortunately, that's just not going to happen when you catch several over-the-head crabs and your boat goes into the other lane and stops," Tomek told USRowing. "One thing that we can rely on is that we were not able to go to the well. That was not everything we had physiologically, so that is a positive."
Rower after rower got out of their boats and tried to describe the conditions.
"It's probably like walking down some stairs and when you're mid-stride the step gets three times the height," Hamish Bond, a New Zealand rower, told reporters. "You go to take a step and you're taking three steps all at once. Or maybe skiing with a blindfold on."
And then there was Spencer Turrin, who trains at the Sydney Rowing Club in Australia: "We get a bit of conditions like this with the ferries and stuff."
