Olympic Memories: Tucker ’87, who started rowing as a college junior, became 2-time Olympian

 

Steve Tucker’s journey to becoming a two-time Olympian rower started, unlikely enough, at a fraternity party.

During the spring of his junior year at MIT, he was at a party where a fraternity brother kept a rowing machine that measured how powerful someone rowed.

“One of my fraternity brothers was very enthusiastic and managed to create drinking games involving a Concept2 rowing machine, a trash can and beverages,” said Tucker, a CMA graduate in the class of 1987.

Tucker’s rowing fraternity brothers were impressed with his fitness and encouraged him to go out for the rowing team.

“I liked rowing right away,” he said. “From the perspective of a swimmer, it was exciting simply to be outside and not looking at the bottom of a pool. I also enjoyed competing in what is perhaps the quintessential team sport.”

At Culver, Tucker had been on the cross country, track and swim teams.

He said while these are team sports, the success of these teams depends on the individual performances of each athlete. In rowing, it is almost guaranteed that the fastest crew is not made up of the fastest individual rowers. A great crew needs leaders and, just as importantly, followers who are able to blend their technique with others to move the boat most efficiently.

“There’s a lot more interaction between you and your team members than there ever is in, like, a relay, which is a sequence competition. You have to match up and row well together every stroke,” he said.

Tucker said not only was he lucky to learn at the fraternity party that he was a powerful rower, he also was lucky to be at a school that would allow someone to join the team as a junior.

“There are a lot of schools that wouldn’t allow that,” he said.

Tucker had the same experience at Culver, where he joined the swim team as a junior.

“Swimming practice at Culver was just survival,” Tucker said. “I just swam freestyle because I really didn’t learn to swim anything else. I don’t think I was disciplined enough to learn good techniques for other strokes.”

He believes competing as a runner helped him to become a good rower, saying much of rowing depends on leg strength.

“Your legs do provide most of your power. At the end of the race, it’s your legs that are really tired in rowing,” he said. “But swimming gave me the mindset and training and discipline that I needed to succeed in rowing.”

During his senior year of college he began thinking about rowing beyond graduation as he saw his ergometer scores become competitive with national team rowers.

“Through my college years I was getting stronger. At MIT we would test our fitness using the ergometer, and I could see that, if my fitness continued on this trajectory, I would soon have ergometer scores competitive with those of U.S. national team members,” Tucker said.

He was right. After graduation in 1991 he took a research job at Harvard Medical School allowing him to remain in Boston and to row with other national team hopefuls before and after work.

For two years Tucker tried but failed to make even the national team selection camp.

“I knew I had the fitness to make the team, but I didn’t have the 6-foot-plus stature or the Ivy League pedigree that coaches were looking for, so I learned to row the single scull where I could prove my speed individually on the water,” Tucker said.

Turner quickly had success racing the single scull and was invited in 1994 to train in Augusta, Georgia, where USRowing located their sculling center in preparation for the Atlanta Olympic Games. He didn’t qualify for those Olympics, but he almost qualified for the ’96 world championships, placing second at the lightweight single trials.

“That close finish encouraged me to keep training after the ’96 Olympics,” he said.

He made his first national team the following year, finishing fourth in the lightweight single scull at the ’97 world championships, and he subsequently earned a berth on every national team through 2004.

 

 

In 1999 he finished sixth in the lightweight double scull at the world championships, qualifying the United States’ lightweight double scull entry for the Sydney Olympics.

Tucker finished in 11^th place at the Olympics in Sydney, Australia, in 2000. He said they were memorable because he thought it would be his only Olympics.

After finishing third overall in the 2003 World Cup standings, he felt as though he had a better shot at competing at Athens “so it was a little bit of a different experience.”

“We were looking for a medal finish,” he said. “In my first experience at Sydney I would have been very happy to make the top six, which is the first final.”

He finished seventh at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

He had fun at both.

In Australia there was a big rivalry between the U.S. and Australia in the four by 100 swimming relay. The U.S. teams had won the race all seven times it had been competed in the Olympics, but the Australians were looking for a win in their home pool.

Tucker was eager to see the race, but he didn’t have a ticket to the event. Since Tucker had been a swimmer, he thought he could pass as an Olympic swimmer. So, he slipped on the bus with all the swimmers heading to the pool. They got there just as the race was about to start.

“I ran in with them. I got on the pool deck for that event. Being a swimmer, but not a great swimmer, it was fun to be there with the world’s best swimmers. It was very exciting,” he said.

He saw the Australians win by 0.19 seconds, breaking the word record by 1.5 seconds.

He had his fun after his competition in Athens, too, attending parties, including seeing Michael Phelps at a Sports Illustrated event. He said it seemed like an endless string of dinners and parties to go to.

“I just remember being so tired that I fell asleep on the subway and waking up beyond the stop for the Olympic village,” he said.

He said an amusing quirk about the games in Athens is that everything was so new around the Olympic Village that a lot of the taxi drivers would get lost.

“One night we were coming back to the village,” he said. “We were close enough to see the entrance, but the taxi driver couldn’t figure out which streets went through. He was trying every street and running up the meter. Fortunately, in the car with me were two more-than-intimidating Nigerian wrestlers. The told him, ‘Stop. We’re getting out.’ And that’s what happened.”

He enjoyed the closing ceremony where all the athletes flooded into the stadium.

“That was a lot of fun because you meet athletes from different countries and often trade gear with them. You end up with a neat collection of gear from all different countries,” he said.

He said security also was lax after the games, so he and a friend went swimming in the Olympic pool and dove off the 10-meter platform, then rode bicycles around the velodrome track.

“All the guards had gone home at that point, so that was a lot of fun,” he said.

What else did you expect from someone whose Olympic journey started at a frat party?

These days Tucker, who graduated from MIT with a degree in physics, is working on a fitness wearable for swimmers. It’s a device that attaches to swim goggles that gives swimmers metrics, such as speed and lap split.

“Because in swimming you don’t get a lot of immediate feedback, while in rowing we would have speedometer and force measurement devices that I found to be very valuable in our training. I thought bringing something like that to swimming would be helpful,” he said.

Plus, it could provide some fun at a frat party.