Olympic Preview Series: Jacob Plihal Represents

Whatever place single sculler Jacob Plihal finishes in the Paris Olympics, he'll have had a successful Games for the USA. That's because USRowing hasn't qualified a male sculler in any Olympic event—single, double, or quad—since 2016 or a men's single since Ken Jerkowski in 2012 and 2008.

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Whatever place single sculler Jacob Plihal finishes in the Paris Olympics, he’ll have had a successful Games for the USA. That’s because USRowing hasn’t qualified a male sculler in any Olympic event—single, double, or quad—since 2016 (the lightweight double of Andrew Campbell and Josh Konieczny, which finished fifth) or a men’s single since Ken Jerkowski in 2012 and 2008.

Plihal’s Olympic placing will fall somewhere between his best result of the year—he crossed the line ahead of defending Olympic silver medalist Kjetil Borsch at the Final Olympic and Paralympic Qualifying Regatta to qualify for Paris—and his recent loss to Oli Zeidler (seventh in the last Olympics) by the brutal official verdict of “Easily” in the final of the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley Royal Regatta earlier in the month. Zeidler, the defending world champion, enters Paris as a favorite along with Dutchman and University of Washington oarsman Simon Van Dorp.

A 2018 graduate of Northeastern University who has been living and training in Craftsbury, Vermont as part of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project, Plihal is a proven boat-mover who was making pairs go fast in training this winter before switching to the single (he sculled in U.S. Under-23 National Team quads in 2017 and 2018) and winning Olympic trials in April. Because the U.S. hadn’t qualified the boat class with a top-nine finish at last year’s Worlds, Plihal had to go to Lucerne for the FOPQR.

Making the Olympic team for the first time six years after graduating from a top rowing university and having made multiple U.S. National Teams on various levels along the way is the norm in 21st-century elite rowing.

U.S. chief Olympic coach Josy Verdonkschot has been clear in that. “Identifying athletes, building those athletes, and retaining them within a professional training environment for six to 10 or more years, with the necessary medical and scientific support as other nations have,” is what it takes.

The men’s and women’s Olympic singles events feature the biggest fields and hardest progressions to the finals with 32 countries in each—twice as many as the next biggest events, the lightweight doubles, with 16 countries, and more than quadruple the eights fields of seven countries. Plihal is the first American man in a dozen years to earn a place in the Olympic’s toughest event. Finding out how high a finish he can achieve starts Saturday morning, July 27 at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium.

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