Caryn Davies

Davies was recruited into rowing at 12 years of age. She started rowing competitively a year later in Australia in 1996, at the Friends' School in Hobart. A local rowing club also recruited her into single sculling, where groups of teenagers launched off a beach into tidal estuarine waters. Within six months she was the Tasmanian under-15 single sculls champion. Returning from Australia she continued with Cascadilla Boat Club and the Ithaca High School rowing team. In 1998, as a 16-year-old she competed in the world's biggest rowing race, the Head of the Charles in Boston. Because she had already placed in the top three in a junior race at the Canadian Henley the summer before the race, officials insisted on placing her, as the only junior, into the championship category of top senior international rowers; she put up a creditable performance by placing 16th. The following summer (1999) she made her first national team, coming second in the US junior eight in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, followed by a gold medal in a four at the junior world championships in Zagreb, Croatia, in 2000, the first gold medal ever by US Junior women.[2][14] She also won the prestigious Stotesbury cup regatta and the Scholastic Rowing Association single sculls in both 1999 and 2000, and the USRowing Youth invitational in 2000, placing her as the top US junior female rower at the time she left high school. Caryn's brother Kenneth also represented the US as a junior rower, and well as rowing at Cornell University, achieving the position of Commodore of the Cornell Crew in his senior year and receiving All Ivy Academic Honors for all four years.

Davies rowed for Harvard from 2001–2003,[9] leading the team to an NCAA championship in 2003, and again in 2005, after taking a year off for the Olympics. She has again taken a year off from Columbia Law School to compete in 2012.[15] Most national team training has been based in Princeton, New Jersey, where the US women's team shares a boathouse and a lake with Princeton University, whereas winter training was based in San Diego.

Davies has the ability to row starboard, port, or scull at an international level.[16] At 6' 4" she was the tallest member of the U.S. Women's National Team. She was part of the U.S. Olympic women's eight that set a world record in the heat prior to a silver medal in the final in Athens, Greece. She was stroking the eight that repeated the feat in the World Cup in Lucerne in May 2012. As the most experienced oarsperson on the U.S. women's team she acted as a guiding figure: "Remember it's just like the World Championships – the same people doing the same thing – but with more flags."[17]

As of 2019, Davies has won the C.R.A.S.H-Bs three times: first as a junior in 2000,[18] next in the open category in 2005, and in 2019 (at a rowing age of 37), she again won the open category.[19] She serves as the athlete demonstrating rowing technique in video for the Concept II rowing-machine.[20] Davies also promotes youth fitness through World Fit and gives inspirational talks to youth groups.[21]

Davies' hobbies include travel, sailing, downhill skiing, horseback riding, yoga, and ballroom dancing.[2][17] In high school, she competed for several years in competitive downhill skiing, reaching a 7th place in giant slalom in New York State. As a senior at Harvard, she competed on the ballroom team.

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