After 10 years, Megan Kalmoe hopes to end rowing career in gold

RIO DE JANEIRO – "I really hope," Megan Kalmoe says, "that this is going to be the last one."

That sounds like an unusual sentiment from a high-level Olympic athlete. Kalmoe was born in Minneapolis, grew up in St. Croix Falls, Wis., emerged as a standout rower at the University of Washington and has dedicated her life to the intense, thrice-daily, year-round training required of her exhausting sport for the past 10 years.

In what she plans — hopes? — to be her final Olympics, Kalmoe is looking forward to a rewarding culmination of her career, and what will follow.

"This is an awesome thing that I get to do," she said. "I really enjoy being an athlete but I'm really hoping I will find some closure and feel really good about whatever result I'll get in Rio, and be ready to try something different."

Like: Rest. For once.

Kalmoe's boyfriend is a physician who has taken a fellowship in San Diego. Kalmoe plans to move from Princeton, N.J., where she has lived and trained for a decade, to the West Coast after Rio.

"I've been traveling to San Diego once a year since 2004 to do winter training," Kalmoe said. "My plan for myself that I built into the rest of the year is to try to relax as much as possible for a couple of months, at least. I've been doing what I'm doing now, training full-time, for 10 years with no break.

She picked up rowing at the University of Washington in 2002 and finished fifth in 2008 at Beijing in the double sculls. In 2012 in London, she won a bronze in the quadruple sculls, the first ever Olympic medal in that event for the United States.

A versatile and powerful rower, Kalmoe will compete in the quadruple sculls, starting on Saturday. Her team won gold at the 2015 World Championships and could take the first U.S. Olympic gold medal in that event.

As her career heads toward a culmination, Kalmoe is pensive.

"Over the last year in particular I've had many opportunities to reflect on what I've been doing since I got into this in 2006, and I feel really lucky," she said. "I feel like things have been building and building and getting better as I've been here longer. I want to have a great result in Rio but I feel as if I'm leaving on a high note no matter what I do."

Her mother, Mary Martin, figures she has piled up about 150,000 air miles following Megan's rowing career. Because Megan was an excellent student with diverse interests, Mary wasn't sure rowing was going to be a career until Megan turned down an Alaskan vacation after graduating from Washington.

Martin is traveling to Rio. She may be hearing warnings about the conditions there, but she's not likely to hear complaints from her daughter.

In a long blog post, Kalmoe asked the media to tone down alarmist reactions to the problems besetting the Rio Olympics.

In a phone conversation from Princeton last week, Kalmoe said, "I am really excited. This is my third team so I know more than a lot of people that are going how awesome the Olympics are and what a special privilege and experience it is to be with so many great athletes from so many sports and different countries.

"To have this atmosphere that the media is focused on is troubling. This is something I think we should all be excited about."

Martin remembers being in France last September, watching Kalmoe win gold. "That was a long time coming," Martin said. "It was fairly dramatic. They were not favored to win and the Germans, at the end of the race, looked over their shoulder and said, 'Oh, my God, there are the Americans.' We blew right past them.