Summer 2013

By Anna Hiatt ’12J

Nikki Bourassa ’13 (center) completed an outstanding four-year rowing career at Columbia by leading the Lions’ varsity eight to a 5–1 record in 2013. PHOTO: ANNA HIATT ’12JColumbia crew’s practice room at the Dodge Physical Fitness Center hums with the sound of rowing machines, the ergometer fans drowning out coxswain chatter and noise from the rest of the gym. Women’s head coach Scott Ramsey labels each machine with a yellow Post-it note bearing the name of the rower who is supposed to sit there. Nikki Bourassa ’13 sits front and center, her rowing machine pushed close to a wall of mirrors; she sets the pace.

Bourassa is steady and unrelenting. She watches the monitor with laser focus as the meters and minutes count down. When she prepares to kick off or when she starts to take another stroke, her back and shoulder muscles engage and flex.

 “We know that she’s genetically gifted. I think she doesn’t get enough credit for her mental strength and her toughness,” Ramsey says. “It’s in her DNA. She has to be the best. This is reflected in how she approaches her training.”

 Bourassa wants to be an Olympian one day. Unlike most athletes with grand ambitions, though, Bourassa, who graduated in May with a degree in evolutionary biology, has a real shot.

 When she signed up for crew as a high school freshman, Bourassa knew what she was getting into. Her father, Louis, had rowed for Canada at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and at the World Championships. Although the elder Bourassa never pushed his daughter to follow in his footsteps, she did so nonetheless. “I picked up rowing because of him in the first place,” she says matter-of-factly.

 For college, Bourassa had set her sights on Princeton, but when the rowing team didn’t give her a second look, she turned to Columbia, where, as a first-year, she showed impressive strength and metronomic rhythm in the boat. When the coaches decided lineups, they placed her in stroke seat, the spot facing the coxswain that’s reserved for an unflappable rower with unrelenting endurance who rows at a steady, rhythmic pace even in the most grueling parts of the race. After Ramsey took over as head coach of women’s crew in July 2011, he started moving her around the boat. He saw that she was an all-around talented rower, unfazed and unrelenting, but also strong and technically masterful. Bourassa was an asset in any seat.

 Last summer, she was selected to train at Vesper Boat Club’s U23 Lightweight Women Rowing Program in Philadelphia, one of the country’s elite rowing camps for lightweight women. She quickly made herself an essential part of the team, and when she applied to camp for summer 2013, head coach Scott Wisniewski was happy to have her back. Over the course of the last year, she’s only continued to improve, and he’s sure that now Bourassa is one of the top seven lightweight women rowers in the country, if not one of the top three to five.

 “Based on her most recent [two-kilometer] score [from the beginning of March], if she were to pull that at Vesper, she would have been the fastest lightweight woman we would have had ever,” Wisniewski said. “We would instantly accept a heavyweight woman into our program who had pulled that score.”

During her time at Columbia, Bourassa became the school’s second women’s rower to win a title at the country’s elite indoor rowing championship, C.R.A.S.H.-B. An ergometer is an indoor rowing machine that tests sheer strength but not necessarily rowing ability, so the person with the lowest time on the erg might not be able to move a boat with the same efficiency. But Bourassa excels at both, Ramsey says.

In a sport of giants, where the average rower is classified as “heavyweight,” Bourassa isn’t. At 5-ft.-9 and a bit above 130 lbs., Bourassa is a long and lanky rower with little body fat — a natural lightweight. But unlike Columbia men’s crew, which has heavyweight and lightweight teams, the women’s squad isn’t designated by weight class. All women row in the same boat, regardless of their weight.

Bourassa walks with the swagger of an athlete, in full control of her body. As she sits perfectly still in the boat, waiting for the call to start, she appears poised, even elegant; her back is straight, her head level and steady, her muscles taut and ready to fire. And when she begins to row, her Olympic potential becomes obvious.

Libby Peters ’06, assistant coach for Columbia women’s crew, has little doubt Bourassa can be an elite lightweight. And hers is an expert opinion: Twice during her college career Peters won the Under-23 Collegiate Lightweight title at C.R.A.S.H.-B.s; she was the first Columbia women’s rower to do so. In 2012, as a junior, Bourassa became the second. After graduating from Columbia, Peters won bronze at the 2008 World Championships in the lightweight quad. But in 2009, after just a year with the national team, Peters was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and to undergo treatment, she had to stop rowing.

Four and a half years later, she’s healthy again, but she’s missed her chance to row at the elite level. During her career, Peters says, she focused on the finish line and not the individual strokes — the destination and not the journey. Today, she wishes she’d savored each day more, and Peters is intent on helping Bourassa focus on the present. If everything goes as it should, Peters says, “I don’t think there’s a limit to what she can do as a lightweight rower.”

Bourassa helped Columbia’s crew to an outstanding 2013 season. On March 30, Columbia beat Yale and Penn to win the Connell Cup varsity eight for the first time. After a loss to Princeton on April 6, the Lions bounced back the next day to defeat Dartmouth and Northeastern and win their first Woodbury Cup. Following a win over Bucknell and a victory in the Dunn Bowl against Brown and Cornell, the Lions defeated Brown once again to win the Eastern Sprints Regatta. Columbia qualified for the grand final at the Ivy League championships, finishing fifth.

Bourassa was named to the Collegiate Rowing Coaches Association Division I Mid-Atlantic All-Region team and one of its 2012–13 National Scholar Athletes. She also received Academic All-Ivy League honors.

This summer, Bourassa will row once again for Vesper Boat Club’s under-23 program. She has thought about teaching but was unsure as of graduation. However, if things go according to plan, in three years she’ll be thinking about the Olympics, 30 years after her father raced for Canada.