When Connor Toomey signed up for a camp at Albany Rowing Center in the summer after seventh grade, he thought that rowing would be just a hobby.
“I kind of just enjoyed being outdoors with some of my friends. I always played basketball and baseball growing up,” said Toomey, a lifelong Albany resident. “So I never thought I’d be rowing as anything more than just as a hobby.”
Nine years later — after four years at Albany Rowing Center, one at Saratoga Racing Association, and four at Syracuse University — he capped his rowing career at the Henley Royal Regatta, the “most prestigious regatta in the world.”
“To be honest, I never thought I’d be good enough to be invited on this trip,” Toomey said. “After all the hours of hard work and dedication, it culminated with this, and I think it’s very fitting, a good send off, because it was a good group of guys. The experience — there’s nothing else like it. So it was the perfect ending to a really good college career.”
Toomey raced in the Temple Challenge Cup at Henley in the five-seat position of Syracuse’s boat. He and his seven teammates knocked off the Oxford University B-team, the University of London, and Colgate University before losing to the Oxford University A-team in the final.
Syracuse had not raced in a final at Henley since 1988.
“I think everybody really bought into just trusting everyone to do their job and, most importantly, we all had a lot of fun. We didn’t expect to make it to the finals. We were just happy to be there,” Toomey said. “I think in a lot of sports, you know, sometimes you can get caught up in the moment and the pressure but we were just grateful to be there.”
Henley was first held in 1839 and attracts more than 300,000 spectators each year. The annual regatta — which declares itself “undoubtedly the best-known regatta in the world” — is…
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