Vesper team with GT Crew Alumni wins Henley!!

Post date: Aug 16, 2010 3:19:32 PM

GT CREW ALUMNI John Kapteyn WINS Henley with Mike Vuksich in the Senior A Lightweight 2x!

The GTCA would like to offer a huge congratulations to John Kapteyn ('07) and his teammate and roommate Mike Vuksich for winning the 2010 Henley in the Sr A Lwt 2x!! The duo was representing Vesper Rowing Club in Philadelphia.

Below you will find a race recap from John's teammate Mike.

I've never prepared for a race like I/We did for this one. We practiced every chance we got, very light, but still trying to make it perfect. John and I literally rowed down the course lightly talking through where we thought we could be at this point in the race and how we would respond. I made the calls during the race, but there was no need, we were completely on the same page because of our prep. We sat on 5 different occasions, eyes closed, and visualized the race and talked through our moves, all with where we thought we would be. We showed up to the course at the last possible minute on purpose, coached said we were hard to find, we wanted that. He wished us luck and we did our warm up. We had a bulls-eye on our back. When you have the fastest time in the heats, you are the boat to watch out for. However, times in the heats don't mean shit honestly. People are a different beast in the finals.

We were in the blocks and in lane 4. Lights went green and we blasted off the line.

We had a good start. At the fist 500 we were in 4th. The first place boat was 3 lengths out in front. That's a huge margin, the race is usually over when that happens. 3 lengths means 3 times the size of the boat your rowing, and that's how far the first place boat was on us at the 500. We knew we would be down, but not nearly by that much, things were not going according to plan in that regard. We were touching the other boats but still in fourth. At 600 in we took a power 10 that moved us into 3rd. We had good rhythm after that. Strong quick but still so far behind the 1st place boat. If I turned fully around, then I could see them, and they were in the lane next to us. John and I were just praying for the 1000 because we had a monster move in the bag that hopefully would bring us close. We got to the thousand in third, and then it was just two boats left in the race after our move. We crushed the 2nd place boat and by the 500 to go we were touching the first place boat. We started our sprint then. We pulled even at 300 to go, and at 200 we kicked it up one more time and moved through them finally. We won by .8 seconds. The crazy part was is we visualized the race almost exactly as it happened. We were down where we thought we would be. We had an answer for everything and never panicked. It was great!