How winning a silver medal in the Paralympics feels for one MIT grad student

This year’s U.S. Paralympics mixed-four crew won the silver medal in Paris over the weekend.

The athletes hit the water six days a week for the past two years to prepare for the Paris Games. Four competitors have clubfoot, qualifying them for the Paralympics.

Their coxswain, Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Emelie Eldracher, is not a para-athlete. Eldracher says winning a silver feels incredible.

“I think every person really put a lot of thought process into making this a positive experience for everyone else,” Eldracher says. “Then to be able to pinnacle that two-year work ethic into one race was just absolutely unreal.”

Here & Now’s Lisa Mullins: Tell us about the crew itself.

Emelie Eldracher: Our stroke seat — which is the person who's setting the rhythm — that is Ben Washburne from Williams College, followed by Alex Flynn, who goes to Tufts University, which is kind of awesome that they were stern paired because Williams and Tufts have a pretty big rowing rivalry. Followed in the two seat by Gemma Wollenschlaeger, a rising senior at Temple University. Then we have Skylar Dahl from the University of Virginia. And then you have me in the front of the boat, the coxswain seat, as a graduate student at MIT.

Lisa Mullins: And I want to talk about you as a student from MIT in just a second, but first tell us your role in the boat.

Eldracher: I am in the boat with the athletes. So there are four people rowing and then in the very front of the boat, there's a hole, and I sit in that hole, and from that position, I'm steering the boat. And giving motivational and technical calls, so I'm right in there with them.

Mullins: And so do you have to work on calming your nerves and their nerves?

I mean, I know that you've all competed before, and some of them have competed nationally. But how, when you're in the Paralympics, do you keep your emotions in check?

Eldracher: I think a large part of that was driven by our fantastic coach, Tom Siddall, who is a current coach at Harvard University. And he had a meeting with us a couple of days before the race. And he said, you know, ‘We're going to acknowledge right now that this is the biggest race that any of you have ever been in.’

This is the first time that any of us have been to the Paralympics. And we sat down as a group to kind of discuss anything we wanted to discuss and say, ‘This is huge and let's acknowledge that we're probably feeling some nerves right now.’

So that's a big thing that got us started and something that I personally do is I pray and I'm very close to my mom and I'll give my mom a call and so I'm very lucky to have that support as well to help calm my nerves.

Something I think is really important for my own role is to stay as calm as I can, because if I get chaotic, then I'm the voice in their head, right? So, they don't want to be hearing chaos.

If you're in a plane, you don't want to hear the pilot start freaking out over the megaphone. So, that's kind of a part of my role as well. No matter my own feelings, I stay steady for my teammates.

Mullins: By the way, do you call your mom from the boat?

Eldracher: No. That is a good question. No, no, no. Not in the boat. See, the thing is, that would be a disqualifiable offense, so I am not calling anyone from the boat.

Mullins: There is, Emelie, a really tight link between the work that you do as an athlete on the water and the research you do as a grad student at MIT. Can you briefly explain it for us?

Eldracher: My goal in this is how can we, from a single camera — anyone, for a low cost — understand their technique? That's the question. Because in rowing, there are systems that give you really good biomechanic information, but they may be more expensive, or they may be, only able to get insights from a single angle, or they might have sensors involved.

And so my goal going into the project is if I didn't have any of those things, and I just had my phone, if I were to point it at an athlete, could I give them technical feedback? So just from their motion understanding, this is how strong you are and where could we get extra speed in your stroke? And another layer on that is, can we apply that to para-rowers?

So I really hope to contribute to the sphere and hopefully we can use AI in a way that influences athletes to help them get that one-hundredth of a second, as our coach likes to say, because if you add up all the one-hundredths of a second in a race, That could be the difference between a medal or not.

Mullins: And then it can apply not only to athletes and para-athletes who are rowers, but also to any other sport?

Eldracher: Absolutely. Yes.

Mullins: Emelie Eldracher, grad student at MIT and coxswain for the four rowers who won the silver medal this weekend in their 2000-meter race in the Paralympic Games in Paris. Congratulations to you and to all members of the crew.

And thank you so much for talking with us, Emelie. I know you're exhausted. So thank you.

Eldracher: Thank you for your time, Lisa, and it was a pleasure speaking to you today.

Mullins: You as well.

Mark Navin produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Grace Griffin adapted it for the web.