Rower Dara Alizadeh Pushes For Olympics
[Written by Stephen Wright]
Dara Alizadeh will step up his qualifying bid for the Olympic Games in Paris this summer at the World Rowing Americas Olympic and Paralympic Qualification Regatta in Rio de Janeiro, which starts on Thursday [March 14].
Alizadeh, who finished a respectable eighteenth in the men’s single sculls at the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics in 2021, will need a top-five finish to secure his passage to Paris.
Incidentally, the Americas qualifying regatta is the same stage that Alizadeh booked his spot at the previous Olympics.
Alizadeh, who is part Bermudian, British, American, and Iranian, became the island’s third rower behind Jim Butterfield and Shelley Pearson to compete at the Olympics in Tokyo.
The 30-year-old, who was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, but grew up in Harrington Sound, helped Cambridge University to back-to-back wins in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race in 2018 and 2019, serving as Cambridge president in 2019.
He is among a field of 19 rowers at the Americas qualifying regatta, which runs until Sunday.
