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Rowers Hannah Solis-Cohen ’12 (left) and Ned Benning’ 12 (right, front)
“This is our shot. We have to win.” ROWER HANNAH SOLIS-COHEN ’12 likes the moment of peace she finds at each starting line. Normally gregarious, she doesn’t like to talk before a race. Fellow rower Ned Benning ’12 takes deep breaths to stay calm. He never looks at other boats; he stares straight ahead until a green light signals “GO!” Solis-Cohen and Benning had plenty of chances to work on their starting-line techniques over the summer as they competed at the 2011 World Rowing Junior Championships in England. In record-breaking finishes for the U.S., Solis-Cohen, in a double scull, placed ninth overall; Benning, in a quad, placed 10th overall. The championships were held on the same 2,000meter Dorney Lake course in Eton that will be the venue for the Summer Olympic Games in 2012. “It was probably the nicest course I’ve ever rowed on,” Benning says. To reach such a high level of competition, Benning and Solis-Cohen first had to go through a rigorous selection process. Solis-Cohen, for example, was chosen for one of seven spots from a group of 20 girls from across the country. She and Benning endured grueling workouts at elite training camps in Connecticut, with a daily regimen that could include up to 20 miles of rowing and either six-mile runs or weight-lifting sessions. “Your pain tolerance has to go out the window. You can’t back down because everybody else is trying to make those seven spots,” says Solis-Cohen, who, with her partner, Maria Maydan, won first place in world junior rowing trials to secure her spot on the U.S. team.
“We went to trials and we said, ‘This is our shot—if we want to go, we have to win,’” she says. “It sort of lights a fire in you and you get so excited to pull hard. And it’s like, nobody’s going to beat me; it’s just not going to happen.” Solis-Cohen and Benning—along with their rowing partners and coaches—had set lofty goals. In the quad, Benning and his teammates wanted to make the semifinals, which a U.S. quad had not done in 35 years. They did just that, placing fourth in the semis, which put them in 10th place overall. Solis-Cohen and Maydan planned to finish in the single digits, although a U.S. women’s junior double had never placed higher than 11th at the world championships. The pair pushed past boats from Sweden, Brazil, and Romania in the semifinal, and placed third in the B final, behind the Netherlands and Norway. “Honestly, I didn’t see anything that went on during the race,” Solis-Cohen says of the semifinal. “All I know is there were a bunch of boats right there and we passed them.” Benning and Solis-Cohen have returned to rowing for NMH this year, adding extra workouts to their regimens in preparation for a possible tryout for the under-23 U.S. team next summer. On the distant horizon for both is the prospect of rowing on an Olympic team. “It’s so much fun training like that and racing with people from other countries,” Solis-Cohen says. “It’s not something I want to give up just yet.”
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