Karin Constant remembers the day in August 1969 that she was lured into rowing.
“I ran one of these 8 ½ mile loops on the [Schuylkill] river and after I finished, here comes this little guy saying, ‘Would you like to row?’ I’d always been interested. In Germany I would always watch the regattas but the men would not allow women to row at that time. So I would just watch the races. I loved the boats and the way they felt. They were all wood in those days. So when he asked me if I wanted to row, I said, ‘Sure.’ And he said, ‘When would you like to start?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can start tomorrow.’”
Gus Constant, a rower and coach at the Vesper Boat Club, with the encouragement of John B. Kelly Jr., had just started recruiting women.
Jinx Becker was first. Karin was second. Women’s competition was heating up and Vesper, whose eight had won an extraordinary and unexpected gold medal at the 1964 Olympics, wanted to be in the vanguard when women’s rowing hit its stride.
“Gus and I would sit on Vesper’s porch watching the runners go by. ‘There’s a woman with good legs. Let’s ask her.’” “Good legs” did not mean beautiful legs in those days, or even long legs. They were looking for muscular legs for leg drive. Karin herself, only 5-foot-four qualified.
“We’d go down to recreation centers and check out the basketball players and we’d checkout swimmers and if we thought there was somebody that was a good athlete, we would recruit them. So we came up with the first team,” Karin said. They rowed in the Head of the Charles in 1971, one of the first women crews to do so. And Karin went on to national victories.
While her marriage to Gus did not last long, Karin’s love affair with rowing continues to this day. By her count, she has competed in at least 32 years of the HOSR’s half century, often in multiple events. In 1975, the first year women rowed in the HOSR, she won a bronze in the single and a gold in the eight. All told, she’s won 30 first-places at the regatta and has eight of the original silver Thomas Eakins first place medals.
She puts her many rowing awards “way up high in my exercise room so I don’t have to dust them.”
For the past 25 years, Karin has poured her energy into supporting her Masters International women’s group which competes annually at FISA Masters and EuroMasters regattas in different countries. The group has now grown to about 80 women (and about 50 men for the mixed entries). Over the years, the women have hailed from 30 different countries and six continents. Until recently, only a few US women competed at these regattas.
And while she no longer lives in Philadelphia, she loves coming back to the Schuylkill.
She recently wrote in an email: “Since it was my home course, I had a lot of fun during the early HOS races watching out-of-towners negotiating the course. Especially after Columbia Bridge, many did not make the turn tight and early enough and went wide towards West River Drive. Coming into Girard Bridge, they did not know that the current had a tendency to pull you into the wall if you did not stay in the middle of the river.
“Now, with buoys on both sides of the course, we have lost our home-course advantage! :-):-):-)”
––Dotty Brown
We are celebrating the HOSR’s 50th anniversary by highlighting 50 legendary competitors/crews/teams/coaches/influencers that have catapulted the regatta into a fall classic over the last 50 years. This list could never be exhaustive, but will be representative of the breadth of competition, and the culture, of the HOSR. This is an opportunity to hear the stories of the legends that have made the Schuylkill River and Boathouse Row so important to the greater rowing community, and special in our hearts. We celebrate the people by passing down their stories through generations, and affecting change for the future of our sport. We will publish a new story each week, continuing the celebration of our 50th anniversary, leading up to the 2021 regatta.