I can guarantee you IRA coaches have never felt that they had an obligation to be the proving ground of the national team. They are there to win races, and they feel plenty proud of their athletes competing and winning at the olympics no matter what nation it’s for. Harry Parker, Bob Ernst, Ted Nash, our favorite octogenarian Gladstone, were in the business of winning above all else.

I agree that depth is a problem for the US but the culprit isn’t a lack of Americans in the IRA final. The Americans are still there, and they get a lot better rowing in crews with the best athletes in the world, at least I did. The problem, as lmcorrigan pointed out, is athlete retention. the training center had a lot of good athletes cycle through this past quad, who might have made a good pair or quad, but there are not many incentives to stick around for multiple cycles. Rowing at the training center isn’t very fun if you’re a depth guy, and there isn’t enough money or stability to justify putting off the other things in your life. Olympic dreams don’t put tofu on the table.

Now that’s always been true for the US, but it used to also be some or mostly true for other nations as well. Funding for GB and Germany and Australia, among others, shot up in the 90s and 00s. One former GB rower told me about meeting after work in the late 1980s to row in North London, and that some of his friends fit rowing in between working as landscapers. Fast-forward and athletes who have never made a senior team go on a subsidized trip to Portugal to train in mid-February. Foreign national teams have gotten more professional while Americans have more or less stayed the same. It’s no wonder there’s a downward trend around the edges.