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Beating Big Brother: Erin Cafaro Learned How to Compete at Home

January 20, 2012

Front page photo credit: Jordan Matter/Jeremy Saladyga Photography

Growing up with a football player for a big brother is not the actual reason Erin Cafaro is an Olympic champion, training for another run at a medal this summer in London.

But it helped.

At 5’9”, Cafaro is one of the smaller women training for the United States women’s rowing team. Many of her teammates are over six feet. When he played football at the University of California, J.D. Cafaro was listed at 6’2”, 250 pounds.

Cafaro never noticed, she said.

“The funny thing is, the girls I am competing against now are about the same size as he is and I guess I just grew up with this weird self-image that I was just as big and strong as he was,” said the six-time national team athlete.

So that, of course, led to intense competitions in Modesto, Calif., at the Cafaro family home.

“We would set up rollerblade courses and do street ball hockey games. We did running races and threw the ball to each other and see who could throw the hardest and hurt the other person’s hand. Stuff like that.”

It was the kind of thing that drove the teenage Cafaro, who was then playing basketball and running track and field, and molded her intensely competitive nature.

Today, at 28, Cafaro is still that kid sister pushing to beat her beloved big brother as she trains for another chance at an Olympic gold medal.

Cafaro won her first Olympic gold in the women’s eight 2008 in Beijing. By then she had already rowed on two national teams, winning bronze and gold in the four in 2006 and 2007. Following Beijing, Cafaro won double gold at the world championships in the pair and the eight and followed that up with a bronze in the pair in 2010.

Last year, as she was training for the 2011 World Rowing Championships in Bled, Slovenia, Cafaro suffered two rib stress fractures and missed worlds.

“At the time I was really upset and mad because it was such poor timing,” she said. “But if anything, I think it was the best timing because I came into this year really rested and I kind of know my body more than I ever have. I know how to push myself and how to back off. I just feel like it really matured me.

“In 2008, I was a younger athlete and I literally wanted to do a little bit more than anyone else,” she said. “I did not have as much rowing experience, I was one of the youngest on the team and rowed the least amount of time out of anybody. So I felt I had to do more than anyone else.”

Cafaro, who grew up a San Francisco Giants baseball fan, had a habit of adding 22 seconds to every workout she did with the team in honor of her favorite baseball player, Will Clark.

She said she doesn’t do that anymore.
 
“As you get older, it’s not about doing it more, but doing it right and getting it right and really trying to make every practice and every stroke a little bit more focused. So that’s my thing now. I’m trying to make every practice better and more focused than the one before.”

As for her brother: “He’s not competing anymore,” she said. “He’s in the real world now. But he is always there for me and stokes my fire. When you’re training a lot you can kind of get down on yourself, or your motivation can wane a little bit. He knows what to say.”

SHORT STROKES

Cafaro rowed and studied at the University of California, and graduated with a political science degree in 2006 . . . she is on hiatus from Drexel University, where she is studying for a Masters degree in sports management . . . Cafaro hopes to build a career in sports management . . . she enjoys cooking, because she loves eating, reading about sports physiology, lifting heavy things (goes back to the big brother), and the one thing most people don’t know, or only recently found out, was that she danced classical ballet for 12 years. “I don’t think anyone would think of me as graceful. But I did. And I was pretty good at it.”

Click here to visit Erin Cafaro's athlete bio.

Ed Moran

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