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{shortcode-429a20a43b31c14ee603587b9f7215faac9b0e1d}rom the bridge, three boats approach. On the river, they are specks of red, black, and white; then, drawing nearer, they become lines, their long oars sharpening into focus.
The boats disappear beneath the bridge. For a moment, silence.
Then, exploding back into view, each boat becomes eight rowers: gritting their teeth, pulling their oars, and churning quiet water into white-capped waves. Above the boats, onlookers roar in support, but the rowers’ focus is on the next stroke. Even the turn of a head could knock the whole team off balance.
Rowing naturally favors the tallest and heaviest athletes, who can put the most force into every drive. The lightweight division, where every athlete must remain under a set weight, is supposed to be the great equalizer. In a sport determined by lightness, athletes prove themselves both on the water and on the scale. Weight becomes a team sport.
It is an open secret that lightweight rowing can promote disordered eating. The category has been phased out of high school competitions, with USRowing citing health concerns as one reason for the cuts. And as of 2028, lightweight rowing will no longer be an event at the Olympics.
But lightweight rowing persists as a collegiate sport, and Harvard is one of the few schools that offers it. There are just 16 men’s and nine women’s collegiate lightweight teams, though numbers fluctuate year-to-year. Harvard’s program is among the best.
The Crimson interviewed 25 current and former Harvard lightweight rowers for this story. More than half said they witnessed or experienced unhealthy behavior around eating while on Harvard’s rowing teams. Others said they never saw teammates struggle, and several said they thought the sport taught them healthy eating practices.
In a statement, Harvard Athletics wrote that the lightweight rowing program has “dedicated significant resources in recent years to establish its own internal weight management program,” and that it assesses all prospective rowers to determine if they can safely maintain the weight limits.
Just as quickly as the three boats approached the bridge, they fade away. Once they round the river’s curve, it’s impossible to tell which team crosses the finish line first.
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{shortcode-9e32dfdb8c377e15033f759ef2c5d6c2398b7977}acqueline F. Epstein ’18 rowed on the lightweight team for all four of her years at Harvard. After graduating, she went to eating disorder treatment.
Epstein was a swimmer before Harvard and hoped to walk onto the swim team in college. When the team’s coaches told her she would be benched for much of the season, they also mentioned that the lightweight team was looking for walk-ons with an athletic background.
Lightweight rowing is a division designed to make the sport more accessible. In 1917, the first lightweight rowing crew was founded at the University of Pennsylvania. After Penn coach Joseph Wright realized that the best team he could build would be heavy rowers who could generate more power in fewer strokes, better balance the boat, and have the endurance necessary for long races, Wright created a separate lightweight crew to give the rest of his men a chance to row. Men’s lightweight rowing made its way to Harvard four years later, and Radcliffe College established women’s heavy and lightweight teams in 1972.
Today, both the men’s and women’s teams rely on a steady stream of walk-ons to fill their rosters. Epstein, who joined a cohort of more than 10 walk-ons that year, recalls the coaches advertising outside of Annenberg Hall — Harvard’s freshman dining hall — with ergs to encourage students to try out.
To learn the basics of how to row, prospective walk-ons without prior rowing experience spend their first semester practicing separately from the recruits. They spend much of their time in two indoor rowing tanks in Newell Boathouse, which also serves as the men’s boathouse. Sitting in a stationary shell with water on each side to simulate the feeling of pushing oars through the river, the novices perfect their technique and endurance over many hours spent together, the kind of bonding that made Epstein love the team.
Due to their intense training regimen, rowing teams at Harvard form extremely close relationships. Spending more than 20 hours a week on practices and competition, Division I athletes have little time outside of academics and sleep for other activities. Calvin A. Beighle ’25, who walked on to the team freshman year but was cut because he missed too many practices, says that rowing pushed the limits of what he could balance. “I’ve never experienced something like that before,” he says.
Even outside practice, rowers often choose to spend much of their time together. In turn, the close bonds and competitive atmosphere combine to encourage rowers to perform at their best at all times. Zachary M. Foltz ’24 says that the team’s culture encouraged him to put his all into every practice. “It doesn’t matter if there’s 500 meters left on your erg and you literally want to fall off the erg and curl into a ball,” he says. “You just put everything there is.”
The intensity of the sport, which can be difficult to balance with academics, is another reason why the teams are so reliant on walk-ons: retaining rowers can be challenging. Of the 16 freshmen who joined the men’s lightweight team four years ago, nine remain on the team as seniors this season. The women’s side also suffers from attrition. All members of the class of 2025 have left the women’s rowing team, including the class’s four recruits.
Those who stay, like any Division I athlete, must have a drive to be the best. But in a sport defined by weight, that can also lead to a need to be the lightest — a behavior that Epstein noticed early on in her time on the team.
Every winter break, the rowing team flees the icy Charles to spend a week under the warm sun of Sarasota, Florida, practicing twice a day. With the semester of novice training finished, the trip also serves to fully integrate the walk-ons with the rest of the team.
It was on one such trip to Sarasota in 2015 when Epstein first noticed something was off about the team’s food habits.
Today, collegiate lightweight rowing requires women to be less than 130 pounds. Men must be less than 160 pounds, and reach a boat average less than 155 pounds. Due to the weight cutoff, several rowers describe lightweight rowing as a completely different sport from heavyweight. They say that because all athletes are roughly the same size, the races have tight margins, testing athletes’ technique, coordination, and mental fortitude.
Optimization includes technique and strategy, but also extends to weight. Through a practice known as cutting, athletes use dietary changes and exercise to quickly lose weight before race day. Learning to cut weight was an “oral tradition” which older team members passed on to the younger rowers, according to William J. Weiter ’20.
During the Sarasota trip, the team ate breakfast at the hotel each morning. But it was up to rowers to choose their other meals on their own. Each hotel room had a microwave, but few other cooking facilities. Epstein remembers “low cal stuff” as the norm: canned soup, raw vegetables nuked for a few minutes in the microwave, and deli meats. Epstein didn’t really know what she should be doing and how she should be eating. As a new rower, she was too intimidated to reach out for help, making mealtime an isolating experience. All she knew is that she needed to be under 130.
Those patterns continued for her next three years on the team. Six-hour long bus rides without drinking water. Rowers stepping on the scale while holding their food to make sure they’d stay under the limit after eating. At the time, she dismissed her concerns with the team’s weight management practices because she saw them as necessary steps to compete. And although her body was naturally near the weight cutoff, Epstein felt she would connect more to the team if she was losing weight, too. She began to adopt some of the eating practices she witnessed for herself.
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{shortcode-34e8f2b114f673286f89210f17c56443a91cd7ed}utting weight, like nearly every other aspect of rowing, is regimented and precise. The rowing teams mostly compete in the spring, with a few exceptions in the fall, such as the historic Head of the Charles Regatta at Harvard. In the winter, the athletes prepare to make weight. Coaches and a dietitian use body scans of each athlete — along with other measurements — to give each rower a “target weight” that is sustainable for the season, and for the men’s team, optimizes the weight of the boat to stay under the 155 average.
In the spring, rowers must make weight week after week, beginning a routine dietary cycle. The Wednesday before a regatta, the team begins a low-fiber diet, cutting out fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains, while limiting lactose and fatty foods. At the same time, many athletes drink more water to flush out heavy fiber and cut excess salt from their diet to avoid retaining that water weight. Foltz remembers that his diet in the 24 hours before a weigh-in consisted of “half a Clif Bar and a shot of espresso.” In the hours leading up to a weigh-in, rowers who have yet to make their mark cut their last few pounds by “sweating” — wearing warm layers and going for a run or an erg to lose some water weight. Both teams weigh in on Friday afternoons before their weekend regattas.
As soon as the team weighs in, all bets are off. Rowers hydrate and eat as much as they can before the boats launch, rewarding themselves after a difficult week of cutting and fueling their bodies to compete the next day.
Drake N. Deuel ’21, a world record-winning rower, remembers how weight seeped into the team’s traditions, even outside of the season. In the fall, the team would often have Friday “Pint Nights,” where each team member would have a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Rowers who were concerned about their weight would have a sugar-free protein ice cream that Deuel says was “horrible.”
Epstein entered her sophomore year at 105 pounds — more than 20 pounds lighter than when she initially joined the team. She saw a doctor at Harvard who recommended she stop rowing. The doctor repeatedly told her to gain weight and voiced concern for her safety if she were to continue rowing, but with these habits now ingrained in her life, Epstein was resistant to any changes. Instead of quitting altogether, Epstein decided to stay on the team as a coxswain, meaning she would guide and call orders to the boat rather than wield an oar. It was not much safer than rowing.
“When I was a cox, I was like, ‘Okay, I can just focus on being skinny. I don’t have to worry about fueling myself for workouts,’” Epstein says.
Though Epstein decided to go back to rowing for her senior year, her relationship with food didn’t change. And her struggles with eating stuck around with her after graduating. She felt the absence of rowing in her daily life, using the 20 hours she once spent rowing to fixate more intensely on her eating. Her parents saw all of the signs of an eating disorder: counting calories, restricting foods, not going out for dinner if the right options weren’t available. She had low energy levels all the time and was unlike the daughter they remembered. One year after leaving Harvard, they told her that she had to see a doctor.
Upon the doctor’s recommendation, Epstein went to a 30-day inpatient eating disorder facility, where she began to realize the damage that lightweight rowing had inflicted on her life.
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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}ccording to Tracy K. Richmond, the director of the eating disorder program at Boston Children’s Hospital, the demands of lightweight rowing will affect different athletes in different ways. Every person has a weight their body naturally tends towards, so “if it’s well above a lightweight cutoff, they really shouldn’t be rowing lightweight,” she says.
While lightweight rowers are encouraged to switch to heavyweight if they are struggling with weight, athletes on the higher end of the weight spectrum are often more competitive against their smaller peers — leading heavier athletes to stay on lighter teams.“The culture around making weight when I was there was not the best. You had a lot of guys that were just too big and having to cut too much,” Deuel says of the lightweight team.
Benjamin B. Roberts ’23 was a varsity crew athlete while in boarding school. When he walked onto Harvard’s rowing team, he was around six feet and 170 pounds. He didn’t think he was tall or broad enough to be successful in the heavyweight category. At the same time, he knew he’d have to be particularly attentive to his weight if he wanted to compete as a lightweight.
On the men’s lightweight team, he made a plan with his coaches to cut weight healthily. But Roberts found that the constant effort interfered with his sleep and academics — becoming more trouble than he could handle. He rowed with the lightweights until his junior year, then decided to leave the team.
“This isn’t going to work for everyone on a simple physical level. It’s not a failing, it’s just reality,” Roberts says.
But after he quit, he struggled to leave the eating practices in the boathouse. He continued adhering to the strict dieting practices that, on the team, were part of his goals. Without a clear purpose for his extreme behavior around food, Roberts realized that he had an eating disorder.
Many athletes find that after leaving, their behavior around food remains tied to the practices learned from rowing — from restrictive eating cycles to the habit of overeating after weigh-ins. “Patients who calorie count have a really hard time stopping,” Richmond says.
D. Brady Stevens ’19 says that the pattern that lingered most for him was overeating as a form of celebration. It took time for him to transition from a scarcity mentality back to intuitive eating. And for Roberts, finding a healthy post-rowing equilibrium meant he needed to stop overthinking every meal. Over time and with therapy, Roberts learned to recalibrate the way he saw food.
For some former rowers, whose weights are more naturally compatible with the demands of the sport, the nutrition practices taught by rowing allow them to maintain healthy habits after college. The lessons learned — like how to read nutrition labels or that a 500-calorie daily deficit results in one pound of weight loss per week — are relevant to weight management in any context.
Many rowers feel that through rowing, they understand their bodies better. Zachary D. Mecca ’24 has been able to take care of his body by understanding the science of nutrition. “Personally, it’s almost deterred an eating disorder,” he says.
Similarly, Gina M. Cusing ’20 thanks the team for her healthy relationship with food.
Cusing wasn’t planning on rowing in college until a disastrous club fair at the start of her freshman fall left her convinced that she was going to hate her time at Harvard. But her dorm neighbor happened to be a rower, and after the fair, invited Cusing to meet the lightweight team. “It was the most fun I’d had thus far,” Cusing recalls.
An experienced walk-on, Cusing found the Harvard team was a much safer environment than the one she’d experienced in high school. Personalized guidance from the team’s dietitian allowed her to make informed decisions about how her eating choices would affect her body. The dietitian was an advocate for these athletes: when Cusing and her teammates expressed concern that there weren’t enough healthy options in the dining halls, the dietitian worked with Harvard University Dining Services to find a solution.
By the time she graduated in 2020, Cusing believed the way Harvard’s team handled the weight component was “as good as it could have been.”
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{shortcode-3f3e57005be88db1897fbe0aab6a26f27b883007}ut eating disorders are not just a result of body composition: they are both physical and mental. Lightweight rowing necessitates a relationship to weight that might trigger eating disorders for athletes with pre-existing vulnerabilities — especially ones they don’t know they have.
“It’s exposing them to very extreme eating behaviors that may just tip someone over that might not have been tipped over otherwise,” Richmond, the eating disorder expert, says.
When Sean C.W. Hayes ’21-’22 joined the Harvard lightweights, he was a rowing prodigy. But in middle school, he was failing out of his classes. At 12, he started rowing at a club in his hometown where he developed a “rigid mindset” — one which helped him find his academic footing and excel in rowing. In high school, he took home two rowing national titles and was being recruited for both lightweight and heavyweight teams at multiple different schools. He ended up at Harvard, where he rowed in the varsity eight-man at Head of the Charles as a freshman. Success in rowing seemed to follow him — but his all-or-nothing mentality drove him to extremes when it came to weight.
While Hayes was “naturally light” when he started rowing for Harvard, he found himself stuck in inflexible thought patterns when it came to weight management and eating. Though he didn’t need to cut as much or as actively as some of his teammates, he began to focus more and more on his size. He put pressure on himself to be the best — in sport and in weight management, too. He downloaded an app, LifeSum, to track his calories and nutrient groups, which made him feel like he had control over his eating. “I was just totally out of touch with my body signals,” he says.
The more he tried to take control of his weight, the more all-consuming it became. When sophomore year hit, Hayes was 15 pounds lighter than the year before. In his mind, being lighter would reduce his stress. For a while, he was still putting up the same impressive erg scores. But once winter training came around, Hayes was slowing down.
Things all came to a head one day in February in Harvard athletics’ strength and conditioning center. Hayes and his teammates were lifting weights, something they often do together as part of their practice schedule. Below a squat rack, Hayes positioned himself to do TRX inverted rows, tipped on his heels at an angle, about to pull his chest upwards using a pair of ropes. Hayes was paying little attention to his workout; he was tired from his challenging course load, and he hadn’t been taking rest days because he was anxious about his slowing times. As he pulled, the bar on the squat rack — which he had forgotten to remove in a moment of absence — lifted with him. The bar slid out of its place and met the center of his face in the air.
In an instant, Hayes released the taut ropes. The back of his head smashed against the ground as the bar crashed down onto his nose. Hayes was rushed to the trainer’s room, concussed and crying uncontrollably. Associate Head Coach Ian Accomando brought him to the hospital, where he received stitches on the inside of his nose.
“If the bar had fallen an inch or so higher, it would have broken my nose. Fell a little bit lower, would have smashed my teeth,” Hayes says.
Accomando brought Hayes back from the emergency room and took him to dinner near the Radcliffe Quadrangle. Accomando got Hayes a burger, but Hayes was debilitated by the pain and unable to open his jaw wide enough to eat much. Burgers on the table, Accomando presented an option to Hayes. He recognized that Hayes was struggling and had been far slower this season than in the past. He recommended Hayes take a semester abroad to take time off, reset, and get a “change of scenery.” Hayes went to Copenhagen during his junior fall.
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{shortcode-a0fafb3727a5405eac46bd1741f1eafab86bbf7e}arvard Athletics says that both the men’s and women’s lightweight teams have made efforts over the past several years to improve the safety of the rowers. Since the Intercollegiate Rowing Association oversees collegiate lightweight rowing, instead of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, weight management is not strictly regulated on a national level. Harvard’s weight management program is led by a licensed sports dietitian who provides rowers with detailed menus and realistic, healthy weight management strategies. Members of the team are supported by sport psychologists, physicians, athletic trainers, and other mental health professionals. In the fall, prospective rowers are assessed for whether they can safely maintain competition weight regularly, according to Harvard Athletics.
But it’s hard to know whether Harvard’s weight management program has prevented eating disorders — and athletes themselves recalled experiencing both support and failures.
Harvard Athletics has discouraged rowers on the men’s and women’s lightweight teams from speaking with The Crimson on multiple occasions. In a March 26 meeting, a Harvard Athletics spokesperson told rowers they could be misled by reporters asking to interview them. More than two weeks after the meeting, Harvard Athletics circulated a message asking students to direct all interview requests from Crimson reporters to the communications office. The message warned athletes that reporters could approach them in circumspect ways, such as asking for an interview so that a student’s “point of view is included.”
Former rowers recall team sessions with a sports psychologist that provided an opportunity to air team grievances and foster dialogue around the challenges the team is facing. By the time Hayes returned from his semester abroad, he says the men’s team had started working with nutrition and mental health specialists. When he started rowing for Harvard again in the spring, he began seeing a therapist through Harvard’s Counseling and Mental Health Service, where he talked about his rigid mindset and eating concerns. His therapist diagnosed him with an eating disorder.
It took a while for Hayes to make changes after his diagnosis. For one, he did not see a therapist during his gap year for Covid-19. When he came back as a senior, he worked to return to where he was before, earning new personal bests on the erg in the fall. Then, a few weeks before the first race of the spring season, Hayes got Covid-19 and was out of the boathouse for five days. While he was sick and isolated, his psychological struggles with weight reached a critical point. “A lot of unhealthy habits came back, and I put on a lot of weight in a short amount of time. Then I let that get into my head even more,” Hayes describes.
When he came back to the team after his illness, Hayes wasn’t in racing shape — physically or mentally. As the season neared, Hayes had a meeting with his coaches where they asked if he thought he could make weight in time to race. “I didn’t think I would be able to do it healthily,” Hayes says. He told his coaches he wouldn’t be able to make weight, and together they decided it would be best for him to finish the season with a heavyweight boat.
Making this decision was only possible because Hayes had been working with mental health specialists. “If I hadn’t been talking with these people, I would have said yes in a heartbeat,” he says.
Although these resources helped Hayes, several lightweight alumni say they see a need for more direct interface between athletes and experts. Athletes told us that having built-in appointments with experts could promote healthier mental relationships with rowing. These check-ins might help curb extreme weight modification practices before they develop into eating disorders. Moreover, they can address the underlying vulnerabilities that leave some athletes susceptible to disordered eating.
According to a 2019 study of male athletes in 19 sports, rowers reported the highest frequency of extreme weight control behaviors. Jason M. Nagata, a youth men’s eating disorder specialist and one of the authors on the study, says that coaches should be more aware of the signs of eating concerns. If it were on more coaches’ radars, he says, struggling athletes could be identified to get help — preventing significant medical consequences.
To address the psychological component of the sport, Richmond says coaches should consistently remind athletes that the numbers which define a person as “lightweight” are completely arbitrary, and don’t give any value to them as human beings.
On the lightweight team, coaches, dietitians, and sports psychologists encourage athletes to spread out weight loss safely over several months. Still, healthy practices are difficult to enforce. Adhering to an optimal plan is the job of each individual, and requires rowers to avoid procrastinating — which many alumni admit they failed to do. As race day approaches, athletes may see few alternatives to the extreme cutting practices, and some Harvard rowers report staff turning a blind eye. “They probably were aware of it at some level,” Epstein says of the coaches who led the women’s team when she rowed on it between 2014 and 2018, “but they justified it as, this is just the sport. This is what has to happen.”
Coaches and athletes recognize that adhering to weight standards is inherent to the sport. “It’s just part of the job,” Hayes says. “Maybe it’s not always the most fun, but it’s the job we signed up for.”
Despite weight and eating being so central to the “job” of rowing, most rowers see disordered eating as separate from the practices of the sport. Cusing says that eating disorders stem from an individual athlete’s “mental relationship with food.” Roberts repeatedly tells us lightweight “isn’t going to work for everyone.” Hayes says the stress of struggling with eating was “something that I did to myself.” Many more rowers say that the teams prioritize the health of their athletes.
Again and again, alumni emphasize that any issues they had on the team lie not with the sport, but their personal engagement with it. Yet again and again, athletes struggle with disordered eating.
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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}t the high school level, lightweight rowing has faded away. In 2021, USRowing announced that none of its regattas would host lightweight events — citing the dangers around weight. Last year, World Rowing announced that the lightweight event would no longer appear in the Olympics.
But according to Roberts, although lightweight may be disappearing at the Olympics and in high schools, “college is a niche in which it can survive.” In a statement sent to the Crimson, Billy Boyce, Head Coach of the men’s lightweight team, writes that athletes on the rowing team “are not looking to be drafted professionally and many of them will hang up their oars and retire after rowing in college because there is no replicating the experience of being on the team.”
Even so, college lightweight rowing can function as a unique place for smaller athletes to continue rowing. Brahm K. Erdmann ’25, a current captain of the Harvard men’s lightweight rowing team, says that lightweight provides an opportunity to athletes who may not have had the size or strength in high school to be recruited to heavyweight. At the same time, Erdmann is “not upset” that lightweight is leaving the Olympic stage because he believes lightweights are able to compete at a level that is on par with heavyweights. After graduating, Erdmann would love to continue his training and even eventually compete against the heavyweights at the Olympics.
In the years since graduating, Hayes has found his way back to rowing. He is currently completing a Ph.D. at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where he also competes with their boat club. Multiple alumni we spoke to still row, and most remain highly involved in cardio sports such as triathlons and marathons.
Epstein doesn’t weigh herself anymore. Reflecting back after treatment, she recognizes how lightweight rowing sent her down a spiral about her weight. Though many rowers told us about the family they built on the team, that experience remained elusive for Epstein. Though she struggled to ever fully integrate herself socially with the recruits as a walk-on, Epstein says that in college, her identity was defined by the numbers on the scale, by “being able to be a lightweight rower.”
In treatment, Epstein had to decouple these parts of her identity and, as she describes it, realize that “no one really gives a shit what you weigh in the outside world.” Now recovered from her eating disorder, she wonders what could’ve been of her Harvard experience if she had never rowed lightweight in the first place.
Since college, Epstein has continued to row recreationally, for the same reasons she walked onto the team in the first place: a love of cardiovascular training and team competition. At one point, she returned to Cambridge to compete in the Head of the Charles in a team with athletes of all different weights and heights. Epstein felt better on the water than she ever had in college. “If I could have been even just 10 pounds heavier, I think I would have been so much more competitive,” she says of her time on Harvard’s team.
“If I weren’t so focused on being skinny,” she adds. “I think I could have had a much better experience.”
Correction: May 3, 2025
A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of Ian Accomando, associate head coach on the Harvard men’s lightweight rowing team.
—Staff writer Elyse C. Goncalves can be reached at elyse.goncalves@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @e1ysegoncalves.
—Associate Magazine Editor Kate J. Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.
