Up the River

Kelly Salchow was still jetlagged. Just days earlier, she'd been in Greece, competing in the final heat of the quadruple sculls at the 2004 Summer Olympics. She'd placed a disappointing fifth — behind the German, British, Australian and Russian teams — then packed up her gear, flown back to Cincinnati and driven nonstop to Kansas City.

In town only a few hours, she decided to head out along the bleak industrial avenues toward the West Bottoms, past vacant fields and railroad yards. Beyond Kemper Arena, she turned right onto a short gravel road that led toward the river and the Kansas City Rowing Club. The boathouse, its brick façade dull-red beneath a late-August film of city grime, stood at the edge of a dirt lot. Not a trace of shrub, just a patchy field of matted weeds and wild grass.

She came to a stop on the worn scrap of earth that was the club's parking lot and walked down a path to the rock levee overlooking the murky Kansas River. Debris swirled downstream around the West Bottoms' trestle bridges. A stray pit bull was loose somewhere in the area, she knew. Weeks earlier, as she prepared for her rowing finals in Greece, her mother (in town from Ohio to look for an apartment) had driven to the boathouse and run straight back to her car after seeing the dog chewing on a hunk of meat.

"I was afraid," Salchow recalled of her own first visit. "I thought, first of all, I was in the wrong place. And second of all, I shouldn't be there alone."

After more than a decade of competitive rowing, the 30-year-old was starting over, about to begin her first full-time teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute. The school held particular meaning for her — that's where her parents had met. Her father was a teacher, her mother the top student in his class. Her mother had later taught design as well, and when Salchow was still a teen, she decided that she, too, would teach at the college level. She'd balanced sports, academics and a couple of jobs as a graphic designer, and had earned a master's degree at the Rhode Island School of Design when she was 28.

The position became available while Salchow was training in Princeton, New Jersey, for the Athens games. She couldn't take time off, so the school flew out the head of the department to interview her. She was hired within a month. The school also agreed to let her miss the first two weeks of class in order to compete in Greece. Now she had a lot of catching up to do.

Strapped to the roof of her car was the same 20-foot, single-seat racing shell she'd used for training at both the 2004 Athens and 2000 Sydney games. (In Australia, in a field of nine, she'd also placed fifth.) Salchow eased the shell off the rack, hoisted it over a shoulder and headed to the boathouse. It was ironic, she later said: When she'd accepted the job, she still had her sights on a medal. She thought she'd come to Kansas City a champion. Instead, she strode alone through the rusting door of a derelict building, so different from the trophy-lined boathouses where she'd stored her shell for most of her career. She wasn't just leaving her boat here. She was leaving behind her Olympic dreams.

Yet there was another upside to her relocation, besides the job. A few months earlier, Salchow had learned that a second former Olympic hopeful lived in the area. And in one of those small-world coincidences, that person was none other than her old high school rowing coach from back home in Cincinnati. Jenn Jewett was now a volunteer at the rowing club, and it was she who stood inside the dark, cavernous boathouse to greet her former student.

"[She] offered a kind of familiarity to a place I hadn't been before," said Salchow over coffee on the Plaza after class one day last month. She smiled. "It was pretty surreal because she was such a figure from my past. I felt like I was still her high school athlete."

Salchow had raced all over Europe; she'd made it to five World Championships and two Olympics since she'd last spoken to Jewett. Not once did she imagine they'd stand face to face in Kansas City, hugging and sharing racing stories.

Jewett, now 41, hadn't just taught high school competitive rowing. In the spring of 1994, when she was 29, she'd driven from Cincinnati to Philadelphia to try for a slot on the U.S. Rowing National Team. Living out of her car for three weeks while she trained, she won a seat on the team and competed in the World Rowing Championships, held that year in Indianapolis. Though she finished 11th in the women's double, that weekend race was one of her most memorable. She was a woman from the Midwest up against the best in the world.

Jewett never made it to the top tier of her sport. She lost out on three attempts to gain a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. In 1996, at age 31, she retired from racing altogether after failing to make the final cut for the Atlanta games. Leaving competition was gut-wrenching, she said, a feeling "of being done and getting beat." But it was also a relief. "Now I can go and be a real person," she recalls thinking. She moved to Kansas City to be near family and signed on as a firefighter in Kansas City, Kansas. And ever since, five days a week during her off-hours, she has driven from northern Wyandotte County to the rowing club, where she volunteers as club coordinator and head coach.