Defining What it Means To Succeed

The people I know with the best cause to behave arrogantly are, almost invariably, the ones least likely to do so. The most accomplished athletes are also some of the kindest and humblest, which only makes me more excited to see them win.

Esther Lofgren ’07-’09, who just won her second straight rowing World Championship in the women’s eight, is the epitome of this. For as long as I’ve known her, she has always downplayed her own accomplishments and sought to help her teammates.

By the time I met Esther, she was already an extremely accomplished athlete, able to boast of college All-America honors and gold both at U23 Worlds and in the senior World Cup.

I, by contrast, was a spastic freshman with zero rowing experience. While I was proud of a couple of things I’d done in high school, my abilities weren’t really anything to write home about. Mostly, I was just a kid who hustled.

It would probably be easy for an athlete of Esther’s caliber not to notice me. Instead, the opposite happened. When my friend, a fellow walk on, and I were having dinner one night in Leverett House, Esther walked up to us and said, “Do you mind if I join you?” For the non-rowing fans, this would be the rough equivalent of Cam Newton walking up to the hopeful Auburn walk-ons and asking them if he could play Madden with them. Naturally, we said yes.

I can’t say I remember the conversation too clearly. I’m pretty sure Esther claimed to be bad at a couple of things, and I’m also pretty sure another girl told me the exact opposite the next day. But I do remember that after Esther cleared her tray, my friend and I remarked at how kind, how friendly, and how humble this blonde rowing machine was.

In the ensuing year, the team watched as Esther tore up workout after workout. The distance or medium didn’t seem to matter; Esther was going to win. People of her size—6’2” and 175 pounds—probably aren’t expected to be good at things like running, but Esther was. Fitness is fitness, I guess.

But somehow, Esther always managed to encourage me as I tried to make improvements, and that hasn’t changed since she’s graduated and started rowing full time with the U.S. National team.

After graduating from college, Esther has collected medals like candy, and her results this summer have been particularly impressive. She was the only person at Henley Royal Regatta to win two separate cups—the Remenham Challenge Cup and the Princess Grace Challenge Cup—a feat especially impressive given the technical differences between the sculling required for the Princess Grace—a battle between eights—and the sweep rowing required for the Remenham—a quads event. Esther later took fourth in the quad at the World Cup stop in Lucerne, Switzerland. And then came arguably the biggest victory of her career: a win at the World Rowing Championships this past weekend in Bled, Slovenia. The result ensured that the United States would have an eight entered next year in the London Olympics.

Somehow, in between winning World Championships and working in Media and Communications for USRowing, Esther always finds time to think of the little people (both literally and figuratively) like me. She’s always encouraged me, answered my rowing qualms with long and thoughtful responses, and given me honest opinions when I wanted them.

I think it’s her kindness that I’ll remember better than her World Championships and Henley victories. Every year brings a different set of winners, each with his or her own remarkable story. Many of them deserve to be remembered well, but most people’s memories have a limit to the number of sports figures they can hold. So we remember the ones we care about, the ones we knew or the ones who made us think. But we remember our friends best of all.

I don’t think that greatness in athletics makes one a great person. But I do believe that Esther has succeeded in rowing in part because she is a great person. More than that, I believe that becoming a hardworking, kind, loyal person is an end in itself, and it is to that end that Esther is an undisputed champion.