Book Excerpt - The First 50 Years Of Women's Athletics: Anne Marden
December 10, 2020 | Women's Rowing - Open
As part of the celebration of the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton, goprincetontigers.com/50Years will be featuring monthly excerpts from the book that Department of Athletics historian Jerry Price is writing about the evolution of the program from 1970 through 2020. This month's excerpt is from the Olympians chapter and features Anne Marden, the only Princeton athlete ever to make four Olympic teams.
The book will be available in the spring of 2021.
My life has been a series of quests.Anne Marden
The English rain is pelting Anne Marden. The water streaks down from the top of the hood of her blue rain jacket, and the wind is knocking some of it directly into her face.
She is in the county of Oxfordshire, a little more than an hour’s drive west on the M40 from London, surrounded by charmingly English towns with names like Tiddington, Horton-cum-Studley and Weston-on-the-Green.
Such an afternoon would deter most people from their walk. In England this is just a minor inconvenience, if one at all. Besides, while the rain in England might be notorious and relentless, it is also usually temporary, and the sun will suddenly “pop out,” as the British say.
Presumably this weather did not cause her great, great grandfather – or is that great, great, great grandfather – to even flinch. He was a sea captain, and these same rains and wind had to have been an almost daily part of his life on the water.
His life on the land, by the way, also included the ships, at least the ones he would sketch for insurance purposes, in the days before cameras. He would take the sketches and then turn them into paintings, complete with family histories written on the back to be passed down to future generations.
Her own family seafaring history includes another ancestor, this time one who fought with Admiral Nelson as one of the “Band of Brothers” at the Battle of Trafalgar.
She herself is no stranger to the water. Even the most devoted rambler of these countrysides can’t compare to her when it comes to the amount of time she has spent soaking wet, water spraying in her face.
During much of her life, those moments came in a boat, out on waters all over the world. She is Princeton’s only four-time Olympian, and that goes for men as well as women. In fact, Princeton has produced 35 female Olympians, who combined have won 16 medals between them (three gold, seven silver and six bronze). These Tigers have competed in rowing, fencing, soccer, track and field, ice hockey, field hockey, swimming and water polo.
There have also been 78 male Olympians. Marden remains the only one to have made four Olympic teams. Her achievements in rowing include a pair of Olympic silver medals, as well as a lifetime’s worth of pushing herself to her physical limits, and beyond.
If most people wouldn’t want to walk in these rains, well, that’s nothing compared to what it took to make four Olympic rowing teams.
“My life has been a series of quests,” she says.
She uses “university” instead of “college,” “holiday” instead of “vacation” and “rubbish” instead of, well, “bull----,” and that makes her even more British. In reality, though, she grew up not in England but instead in New England, in Concord, Mass.
She was a maverick from Day 1, and it would be awhile until she channeled that spirit into becoming a world-class athlete. In fact, where was Princeton’s only four-time Olympian most likely to be found when she was 15?
“Hah,” she laughs. “I was hanging out. Hanging out in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the townies, smoking cigarettes.”
In fact, where was Princeton’s only four-time Olympian most likely to be found when she was 15?
“Hah,” she laughs. “I was hanging out. Hanging out in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the townies, smoking cigarettes.”
So where did the transformation begin?
She had never been an athlete as a kid. She never wanted to wear a uniform, and instead she and her family were more into pursuits such as skiing and mountain climbing, including being a part of the “4,000 Foot Club” for climbing every mountain over 4,000 feet in New Hampshire.
“I did a lot of hanging out,” she says. “And I didn’t want to hang out in a uniform.”
The mountain climbing left her often muddy and sore, but it also built in her a solid foundation of underlying fitness. When she was 15, she headed off to Phillips Exeter Academy, where she made friends easily, though not the kind of friends most Exeter students make.
“I don’t know how many people go off to boarding school and make friends with the townies,” she says. “That must be a skill.”
Her anti-uniform bias is what, ironically enough, led her down the path to wearing the Olympic uniform.
At Exeter all students were required to play sports, and she didn’t want to play any of the ones that had to wear uniforms. Instead, after she read “A Separate Peace,” which was set at a school modeled after author John Knowles’ experiences as an Exeter student, she found herself in a swimming class run by the swim coach. She found herself as the only person in the class who could swim underwater to retrieve submerged weights.
She had gotten to Exeter in the winter. When it came time to choose a spring sport, she decided to stay with the water theme.
“I tried rowing, and I liked it,” she says. “Everything just fell into place for me there. I decided to stop smoking and focus on rowing.”
She began to make friends with the other Exeter students, especially the ones on the boys’ rowing team. She also threw herself into training, including running track in the winter, lifting weights and bike riding.
When it came time to go to college, she veered away from the school most of her family had attended – Harvard – and instead applied to Princeton.
“I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps,” she says. “They were all the distant relatives I’d avoided all my life.”
She’d row for four years in the first varsity 8 for Princeton, and in her freshman year, in fact, the first varsity 8 included at least one rower from all four classes. The coach that year was Kit Raymond, from whom she learned a great deal. That summer, Kris Korzeniowski, a defector from Communist Poland who had worked with the Canadian national women, was hired as the first full-time head coach of women’s rowing at Princeton.
It was Korzeniowski who was an expert in high performance training and physiology, as well as amateur psychology. What he wasn’t yet an expert at was paperwork, and so no entrance form had been submitted for the Head of the Charles in his first fall in 1977.
Marden’s first year at Princeton came just after women’s rowing had made its Olympic debut (and Princeton alum Carol Brown won a bronze). Marden had a rowing magazine that included a picture of a woman named Joan Lind, who had won a silver medal in single scull.
“I had never done singles before,” Marden says. “That picture of Joan stayed with me though. When we couldn’t row as a team at the Head of the Charles, Kris suggested I try to the single. He told me I had to row 20,000 meters a day in practice, and I thought he might be getting me to not do it.”
Instead, she flourished. Short by contemporary standards at 5-7, she nonetheless was a very good athlete who could run a 5:35 mile but who more than that was tenacious and stubborn. And very, very determined.
As a Princeton sophomore, bad weather forced the postponement of the Eastern Sprints, so she flew across the country to race against women who made up the national team and beat them all. That led to a training camp on Lake Tahoe, where she blew away the field in a three-mile race.
Next up was her national team debut as the stroke of the U.S. team that finished fourth at the 1978 World Championships in New Zealand, where she not only rowed but also got to see some family who lived there.
She would take the 1979-80 academic year off from school to train for the 1980 Olympics, training for a time in a double with a woman named Lisa Hanson, who would marry a man named Greg Stone and who would have a daughter named Gevvie, who would go on to attend Princeton, win an NCAA rowing championship and then a silver medal in the 2016 Olympics in the singles (as well as become a doctor).
Marden’s first Olympic team would the 1980 team. That, of course, was a team that never got to compete in Moscow, as President Jimmy Carter mandated a boycott to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“I wasn’t in a boat that had a real shot at medal, but it was still so crushing,” she says. “It was terrible. We all got invited to the White House, and I went, though there were many who protested. Everyone wanted to compete. I didn’t even watch them.”Anne Marden
That year was to be Marden’s first Olympic experience. It would have been the second for Brown. Like Marden, she didn’t watch them either. She was on a beach in Greece, drinking and sunbathing.
In typical Carol Brown fashion, it wasn’t for lack of trying on her part to be able to compete. She was part of a lawsuit that said that the President didn’t have the authority to call the boycott. She appealed to the international rowing federation to be allowed to compete without representing her country. All of her efforts came up empty.
“It was devastating,” Brown says. “I couldn’t believe it. Our coaches had told us to keep training, and we had gone to Europe to compete in pre-Olympic races, and we beat the East Germans, who went on to win in Moscow. They had beaten us by open water in 1976, and we felt we had closed that gap and were ready to race with anyone in the world.”
Brown’s boat, or the majority of it, would compete and win silver at the 1981 World Championships. She was an alternate on the 1984 team, which won the gold medal in Los Angeles.
Marden went back to Princeton and graduated with the Class of 1981, finishing her Tiger rowing career and winning a senior thesis prize for her thesis entitled “A Microeconomic Approach to the Behavior of the Elite Amateur Athlete.”
She trained on the Charles River and worked hard on her starts, including improving her fitness with training on the track.
She rowed at the World Championships in the singles but didn’t make the finals, and in 1982, she finished fourth at the Worlds in the quad. In 1983, she got cut from the national team.
“I was so upset by getting cut,” she says. “I had worked so hard, and I had done very well. And then just like that I wasn’t on the team.”
She started her comeback at the 1983 Pan Am Games, where she and Monica Hevelka – under the coaching of Joan Lind, who had been that first rowing picture she’d seen – won the gold medal.
Lind went from her coach to her teammate when Marden found herself back in the national team boats, in a quad for 1984. That boat would win silver, falling to the Romanians.
“That was still a boycott Olympics,” she says after the Soviets led an Eastern-bloc boycott as payback for 1980. “We worked really hard and had gelled, and getting a still silver medal meant a lot to us.”
She had considered ending her rowing career after that, and she applied to and attended business school in France. Then the international women’s rowing rules changed, and the distance for races changed from 1,000 meters to 2,000 meters.
“I was definitely more of an endurance athlete,” she says.
She started rowing singles under French coach Jean Pierre Leroux, and 1985 would prove to be a breakthrough year for her.
“In Fountainbleau, I trained for cross country and distance running with the local athletics team,” she says. “I moonlighted on a local bike team, and I found Jean Pierre at the local rowing club. Under his coaching, I achieved a bronze medal finish at the 1985 World Championships, and that was a great moment in my life.”
She moved to London in 1987, where she would train on the Thames and then later on in Oxfordshire, after she met her husband.
She was further motivated by the fact that 1988 figured to be a “complete” Olympics.
“My parents thought the silver medal at the Olympics was great,” she says. “To me, as an athlete, to have more credibility, I wanted to compete against the East Germans and the Russians and everyone else.”
With her MBA, she got a job with JP Morgan in asset management, splitting her time between London and New York. She didn’t do well in the 1986 World Championships, but she would get a bronze in doubles at the 1987 Worlds in Copenhagen.
She ended up making the 1988 team in Seoul as a single. This time, with the entire world there, she and East German Jutta Behrendt ran away from the field in the final, finishing in a photo that went to Behrendt as both were clocked at 7:47.19 for the 2,000 meters. The two had more than a six-second lead over the bronze medalist, Magdalena Georgiana of Bulgaria, who finished in 7:53.65.
Marden took the next year off from rowing while working in Europe. That was when the Berlin Wall came down, and suddenly the landscape of international rowing changed dramatically. Now it was a much more collegial setting, with a different level of camaraderie among the athletes from East and West.
“How could I walk away from that?” she says.
She plowed through for another Olympic cycle and competed in the singles in Barcelona, where she had the fastest time in the heats and qualified easily for the final after a strong semifinal. Her chance for a third Olympic medal, and first gold, vanished though, as a bug she caught slowed her just enough to land her in fourth place.
“It took me a few years to get over that,” she says. “And hey, obviously it would have been great to win four gold medals. But to be able to go to a university that was so supportive of my development and have the support system I had really pointed me to where I ended up. It was so nurturing, and I appreciate it so much.”