For Sophia Luwis, her win today came on the one year anniversary–to the day–of the car accident that ended her 2022 season and cost her a chance to compete for the USA last year after making the team in the lightweight quad.
“I’m not the best at compartmentalizing,” she admitted afterwards, “but leading into this race particularly, I’ve been thinking about how today’s the one year mark from accident.”
Here is Luwis’s own Instagram post from today; talk about a ‘How it started how it’s going’ graphic, yeesh:
A post shared by Sophia Luwis (@sopa_lu)
That was more front of mind for Luwis, even compared to coming into this Worlds seeded first after her gold medal at World Cup 3 in Lucerne.
“Throughout recovery, for a lot of the injuries [I had] and the loss of taste and smell, everybody always referenced this one-year mark,” she said, remembering how her teammate Audrey Boerson, who was in the car with her when the accident happened, came to visit her in the rehab facility, and they realized the 2023 Worlds would start right at the one-year mark.
“We were clutching hands and staring at each other, saying World Championships is one year to the day. We are going to be there. The two of us are going to be there,” Luwis recalled. “Originally, we wanted to do it in the double, but I wasn’t fit enough fast enough. But then it worked out that she became the lightweight spare, which I didn’t even know was an option leading into it. So it just kind of seems unreal that we actually did exactly what we said we were going to do.”
Boerson won the single in the spares racing yesterday.
Luwis said she had this one year mark–and today–in her mind ever since.
“It motivated a lot of tough workouts [and] before I could even do a workout, it motivated a lot of five minute walks. So it feels pretty surreal that like we both got to be here on the day. I raced almost down to the hour of when it happened, given the time difference.”
The race itself, where she held off the Swiss sculler Eline Rol, was, Luwis said, “a rip the band aid off race.”
“With national team trials, you only got two races and, the first one [the time trial] doesn’t count, so you only get that final. I feel like it’s been a long time since Lucerne. There, I was so keyed up and so ready to go because it was just back-to-back racing.”
The Swiss sculler did have a flyer of a race–she did not make the A Final at World Cup 2 or 3 and was sixth at Europeans, but controlling a close race was a confidence booster for Luwis, especially since it was , as she put it, “the first racing in a while, and we have more racing coming up.”
“The first 250 to 500 of any race I do, I don’t care where everybody else is because you feel so precarious and the start is so unstable, so [for me] nobody else exists. Just get into it, find your rhythm and go. Then around the 300 to 500 meters in, I start to look out. [Today} I noticed the Swiss sculler was there, and anybody, especially in singles racing, can pull anything up until maybe the 750.
“Once she was there, I thought, okay, respond to what she does versus do my own moves and I had people respond to me, because I was comfortably in the lead. I thought if I can hold here and I have enough confidence to hold here to just keep responding, then I’ll win. Later in the week is when it becomes more about, people try to respond to me versus me responding to them.”
“It’s not over yet,” Luwis said, when asked about whether today’s full circle moment made for a happy ending to the ordeal that started one year ago. “But if I can get on that podium it will be, and step one was to race September 3rd at World Championships.”
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