30 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTSSUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020
The women on the United
States national rowing team think
that young, healthy people need to
take the coronavirus more seri-
ously. They learned that the hard
way.
More than one-third of the team
was infected with Covid-19, the
disease caused by the virus, in
March and April, during the initial
swell of the virus in New Jersey,
according to Dr. Peter Wenger, the
team doctor for its training center
in Princeton, N.J.
At least 12 women had the virus,
he said, based on various test re-
sults of athletes and observations
he had made of rowers who were
not tested but showed symptoms
of infection. During that first wave
of infections, testing wasn’t yet
widely available.
In late March, several days af-
ter New Jersey instituted a stay-
at-home order as the coronavirus
began to ravage parts of the state,
Marc Nowak, the team’s physical
therapist, tested positive for the
virus after experiencing minor
cold-like symptoms and promptly
reporting them to U.S. Rowing.
In the previous two weeks, No-
wak said, he had come into direct
contact with “pretty much the
whole team” of 33 women during
30-minute physical therapy ses-
sions of hands-on stretching and
muscle and joint manipulation.
Out of caution — and fortunately
for the team — Wenger used one
of his office’s limited coronavirus
tests to check on his colleague.
One by one, starting four or five
days after exposure, rowers be-
gan to show symptoms of infec-
tion.
“In that first wave of things hap-
pening, everything was really
sketchy and there weren’t really
directives about wearing masks,”
said Nowak, who has worked with
the national team for 18 years.
“We just didn’t have the informa-
tion we needed to take the right
precautions.”
Nowak said his wife, who is an
operating room nurse, and two
adult children living with them
also contracted the virus, though
his daughter did not become ill
and later tested positive for anti-
bodies.
“Now the message is, learn
from us and what we’ve gone
through,” Nowak said.
Emily Regan, an Olympic gold
medalist from Williamsville, N.Y.,
who was among those infected,
wrote a post on Facebook this
month highlighting how debilitat-
ing the disease could be, even for
some of the world’s best athletes
who have incredibly powerful and
efficient lungs. Most women at the
training center are vying to make
the eight-oared boat for the Tokyo
Games next summer, when the
United States will try to win its
fourth straight gold medal in that
marquee event.
“The narrative that has been
going around in some places is
that you won’t get the virus if
you’re young and strong, or if you
get it, it won’t be bad, but we’re
perfect examples of how that is to-
tally not true,” Regan said. She
added: “Look what the virus still
did to us. It knocked us down
pretty hard.”
The rowers infected ranged in
age from 23 to 37, Regan said, and
many battled symptoms for
weeks. The cases were catego-
rized as mild, though some ath-
letes dealt with complications for
as many as 40 days, according to
Wenger. None of the rowers re-
quired hospitalization, he said.
Regan, 32, said it took her a
month to feel back to normal after
she fell ill. More than three
months later, she is still trying to
get back into competitive shape,
she said. That level of fitness was
extremely high: Regan is a four-
time world champion in her ninth
year on the national team.
“I’ve never struggled like that
before,” she said.
Early in the year, before the
spread of the virus was well
known in the United States, Regan
and her teammates weren’t wor-
ried about getting infected. They
were preoccupied with making
the team for the Tokyo Olympics
and were anxious that the pan-
demic would affect the Games.
Many could not bear the idea of
the Olympics being postponed or
canceled and enduring another
year of grueling training because
of it. But their priorities changed
in a matter of a few chaotic days.
By mid-March, the pandemic
disrupted the team’s training rou-
tine as sports leagues widely can-
celed competitions and other op-
erations. The rowers had to movetheir team boats out of Princeton
University’s boathouse, at the uni-
versity’s request, and onto trailers
in the adjacent parking lot.
New Jersey’s stay-at-home or-
der on March 21 then sparked a
rush for the rowers to each grab a
rowing machine, called an ergom-
eter, and some weights from their
indoor training facility to bring
home so they could train while
gyms were closed. Three days lat-
er, the Games were postponed un-
til 2021 and their collective mood
was as low as they thought it could
be — until U.S. Rowing delivered
some alarming news.
The federation emailed each of
them to say that Nowak, their
therapist, was likely positive for
Covid-19, and that the rowers
might have been exposed to the
coronavirus.
The athletes were told to quar-
antine for 14 days and pay close at-
tention to how they were feeling
and alert the host families many of
them were living with.
Mass testing stations were not
widely available, and Wenger, the
team doctor, was left to figure out
which rowers might have been in-
fected by using contact tracing
and by closely monitoring themfor symptoms.
Five athletes reported varied
symptoms the day Nowak tested
positive, including fatigue, head-
aches, coughing and congestion,
Wenger said.
Two athletes said they had lost
their sense of smell, so Wenger
subsequently asked other ath-
letes to do what he called “the ba-
con test” — to fry bacon and sniffit. If they didn’t smell anything, it
could mean they were infected.
Kendall Chase, a rower from
Evergreen, Colo., smelled nothing
when she took a whiff of a jar of
strongly scented eucalyptus es-
sential oils. Chase, 25, had written
off a sore throat as a cold because
she didn’t have a fever or a cough.
But then she came down with a
searing headache that lasted for
six days. She described feeling
congested, “like my brain was be-ing destroyed by my sinuses.”
For more than a week, Chase
was sidelined in her host family’s
house, barely able to even leave
her bedroom. She said she could-
n’t remember the last time she
went eight days without working
out. The team usually trains for
four to seven hours a day, includ-
ing two or three separate ses-
sions.
“One day I tried to go for a walk
and I made it maybe 30 seconds
out the door before turning
around,” she said. “I just couldn’t
do it. The sun hurt my eyes so
much that I couldn’t take it.”
Some host families asked row-
ers to move out of their homes,
even if they had no symptoms.
Chase’s hosts were nice enough to
let her stay as long as she wore a
mask and gloves and promised
not to breathe on anyone or “lick
any doorknobs,” she said with a
laugh.
As Chase recovered, Regan was
living in her condominium in
Princeton, N.J., and thought she
had avoided getting the virus. The
day the Olympics were post-
poned, she felt uncharacteristi-
cally short of breath while rowing
on the ergometer on her porch,but she blamed it on the cold
weather and her disappointment
about the Games.
It wasn’t until a full 12 days after
the team had been exposed that
unmistakable symptoms hit her.
First it was exhaustion and a
slight fever. Two days later,
breathing became painful and her
entire body hurt. Her fever rose to
101.7 degrees.
For two days, Regan was in ago-
ny, unable to move and struggling
to breathe. She tried to go for a
light jog once she felt a little better
a few days later, but didn’t last 20
minutes, even when walking, be-
cause her heart rate was so high
and she felt like she was walking
through water. She felt a sense of
panic: she was used to training up
to two hours straight and now she
couldn’t even walk 20 feet without
feeling like she would collapse.
As she ramped up her work-
outs, Regan continued to feel faint
and shaky and described her per-
formance on the ergometer as
“the pace of an average high
school girl.” After a month of feel-
ing like she was dragging around
a 50-pound weight wherever she
went, she felt like herself again.
Regan spent some time with her
family outside Buffalo before re-
turning to Princeton this month to
join about a dozen other rowers on
the team. Many other rowers,
though, have remained with their
families in their hometowns. Matt
Imes, the director of high per-
formance at U.S. Rowing, said the
athletes have been encouraged to
return to training with the team
whenever they feel comfortable.
They are rowing out of a boat-
house on Mercer Lake in West
Windsor, N.J., the team’s second
home in the Princeton area. No
one on the team has shown seri-
ous lingering effects from the vi-
rus, Wenger said.
To return, the rowers must
quarantine for two weeks or quar-
antine for three days and then test
negative for the virus for two con-
secutive days before joining train-
ing sessions. They must wear
masks as soon as they step out of
their cars for practice, but they
don’t have to wear them while
rowing. They also fill out a ques-
tionnaire each day about how they
are feeling, so the doctors and
training staff can keep tabs on
their health.
At practices on Mercer Lake,
they train in single sculls because
those one-person boats allow for
easy social distancing. During in-
door workouts on ergometers, the
machines are spaced 12 feet apart,
unusually far and more than the
six feet of social distance recom-
mended by health officials.
Physical therapy sessions are
now limited to rowers working
through injuries, Nowak said,
with no general sessions geared
toward maintaining peak per-
formance. And, of course, Nowak
and the rowers wear masks.
While so much has changed, the
rowers know they must remain
vigilant about their well-being to
avoid another raft of infections
cutting through the team. Wenger
often reminds them that their
Olympic success is at stake.
“I told them that the people that
stay uninfected and get four-to-
five training blocks in before To-
kyo are the ones who will walk
away with the medals,” Wenger
said. “So that’s one big reason for
them to take precautions ex-
tremely seriously, and they do.”U.S. Rowers, Hit Hard by Virus, Warn the Young That the Threat Is Real
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN NORMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy JULIET MACUREmily Regan began a morning practice at Mercer Lake in West Windsor, N.J., top. “Look what the virus still did to us,” she said. “It
knocked us down pretty hard.” Regan, above left, said it took her a month to feel back to normal, and more than three months later,
she’s still trying to get back into competitive shape. Checking temperatures for the U.S. Women’s Rowing Team, above right.A physical therapist
brought the illness to
the women’s team.
Even the greatest boxers don’t
always know when to hang up
their gloves.
The announcement last week
that Mike Tyson (54, retired for 15
years) would fight Roy Jones Jr.
(51, inactive for two years) in Sep-
tember called to mind the other
boxing immortals who fought one
(or two or three) times too often
and added forgettable chapters to
stellar careers.
Muhammad Ali
When the story of Ali is told, the
last act is usually his loss to Leon
Spinks and then his win in the re-
match to earn the heavyweight ti-
tle for the third time.
But that wasn’t the end for the
Greatest. After a brief retirement,
he returned in 1980 to take on the
new titleholder, Larry Holmes. Ali
was overmatched, and the fight
was stopped by his corner in the
11th round. “Ali could not fight. He
could not dance. He could not even
punch,” Dave Anderson wrote in
The New York Times.
That wasn’t his last shot at a ti-
tle. He went back into the ring
again a year later at age 39. His
opponent, Trevor Berbick, won a
unanimous decision; ringside ob-
servers gave Ali perhaps one
round at most. “You can’t beat Fa-
ther Time,” Ali said after the fight.Sugar Ray Leonard
Dozens of big wins, champi-
onships in five weight classes, a
culminating victory over Roberto
Duran. Sugar Ray Leonard had
done it all as the 1980s came to a
close.
But he didn’t think he was fin-
ished.
In 1991, he went up against 23-
year-old Terry Norris, and it was a
fight too far. The result was a loss
by unanimous decision. “Norris
was simply too much for the 34-
year-old Leonard, too quick and
too strong,” The Times wrote.
Leonard immediately announced
his retirement.
Still, six years later, he went
back into the ring at age 40 to take
on 34-year-old Hector Camacho. It
ended with just the third loss of
Leonard’s career — and the first
by knockout. “His footwork was
awkward,” The Times wrote. “His
jab was ineffective and lacked
snap. He missed badly with many
right hands. And when Camacho
applied pressure, Leonard wilted
without much resistance.”Sugar Ray Robinson
Boxing’s other Sugar Ray is often
considered the best pound-for-
pound fighter ever to step in the
ring. But the end of his career was
similarly uninspired.Robinson was holding a world
title, his last, in 1960, when he lost
it to Paul Pender. At the time, the
prolific Robinson was 38 years old
and an astonishing 142-7-2 in his
career.
He would go on to fight 46 more
times. But championship bouts at
Boston Garden and Yankee Sta-
dium became fights at Wahconah
Park in Pittsfield, Mass., and the
Community Arena in
Steubenville, Ohio. And guys
named Rudolph Bent and Memo
Ayon replaced opponents like
Jake LaMotta and Rocky
Graziano.
At the end, Robinson was losing
as many fights as he was winning.The final fight was a unanimous
loss at age 44 to Joey Archer in
Pittsburgh. Worst of all for the all-
conquering Robinson, the reac-
tion of most fans was pity. “The
crowd gave the faded Sugar man
an ovation for a gallant effort,”
The Associated Press reported.Tyson and Jones
Tyson’s own final bouts, 15 years
ago, after a turbulent career that
included reviving it after a rape
conviction and biting the ear of an
opponent, were hardly nights of
glory.
After getting knocked out at age
35 by Lennox Lewis in a final bid
for a title in 2002, Tyson went backinto the ring three more times. He
beat Clifford Etienne before being
knocked out by Danny Williams
and quitting in the middle of a
fight against Kevin McBride. “If
this does not convince the public
that Tyson is washed up, perhaps
nothing will,” The Times wrote un-
der the headline “Tyson Quits
Fight and May Quit Boxing Next.”
Tyson did quit, until last week’s
announcement of his unlikely
comeback.
For Jones’s part, years after he
last fought for a major title, he
kept plugging away as the cham-
pion of two little-known sanction-
ing bodies, the World Boxing Un-
ion, or W.B.U., and the World Box-ing Federation, or W.B.F., fighting
against no-names as recently as
2018.The Exceptions
A handful of the greats seemed to
walk away at the right time. Joe
Louis, for example, posted a
record of 66-2, then lost to the
younger Rocky Marciano, and
wisely left the ring for good.
And not every comeback story
is a disaster. Floyd Mayweather
made the smart decision in 2017 to
fight someone with little boxing
experience, the U.F.C. star Conor
McGregor. The fight may have
been a gimmick, but Mayweather
got the victory to remain unde-
feated, and everyone made a boat-
load of money.
And then there’s George Fore-
man. After leaving the sport at
age 28, he returned a decade later
to what was expected to be his
own run of ignominy. Starting
with a series of fights against
weaker opposition, Foreman be-
gan winning. He got a title shot at
42 and lost to Evander Holyfield,
but fought credibly. Then at 45, he
landed a fight with champion Mi-
chael Moorer, 26, and knocked
him out, completing one of the
most successful second acts in
sports. But even he lost his last
bout, to Shannon Briggs, at age 48.
Neither Tyson nor Jones is talk-
ing about trying to regain their ti-
tles, for now. Somehow doing so
would defy a long history of box-
ers finishing their careers on the
canvas.Like Many Boxing Greats,
Tyson Can’t Resist the Call
Of the Ring in Retirement
It was announced last week
that 54-year-old Mike Tyson,
left, would fight against Roy
Jones Jr., 51, in September.STEVE MARCUS/REUTERSBy VICTOR MATHEROrder home delivery today.