Syracuse rower overcomes burnout to compete in the Olympics

At the start of her senior year of high school in Vilnius, Lithuania, Kamile Kralikaite became disillusioned with the sport she dedicated herself to since she was 13.

After years of eating, sleeping and breathing rowing, Kralikaite simply wasn’t enjoying her sport anymore.

Then one day, Kralikaite checked her DMs on Instagram. At the top of her inbox she found a message from Syracuse University’s rowing team.

“I was like, ‘I might as well just have a chat with them,’” Kralikaite said, adding that she had never heard of Syracuse before then.

That initial conversation led Kralikaite to make an official campus visit in the winter of 2019.

By the time she left Manley Field House, Kralikaite was committed.

Today, the 2024 SU graduate’s love for rowing is as strong as ever. She finished 10th at the 2023 World Rowing Championships last September to secure their spot to represent Lithuania at the Paris Games, where they went on to finish fifth overall in the women’s pairs contest on Aug. 2.

But Kralikaite’s success is not the reason for her renewed enthusiasm; rather, the international relations major said she rediscovered her passion for the sport through the community, openness and camaraderie on the Syracuse team.

As a part of the Lithuanian four-year project to build a team capable of qualifying for the 2018 Youth Olympics, Kralikaite said she “jumped into very serious sport from the very beginning.”

“It was a very intense workload for a child,” she said.

As a 13-year-old, Kralikaite lived at a training camp and did two training sessions per day; she had the weekends off, and she’d spend that time at home with her family.

“I had to move to the town where I rowed,” Kralikaite said. “I had to change schools.”

By its final year, the six-person program had dwindled to two, including Kralikaite. After competing in the 2018 Youth Olympics in a pair, her rowing partner also stopped rowing.

“Our coach was quite rough on us,” she said. “I have a very close relationship with him now, but he was quite rough on us when we were young. He wanted us to be sort of perfect athletes that never do anything besides rowing and school.”

Kralikaite said even school became secondary to rowing. Putting so much emphasis on rowing was “hard on our mental health,” she said.

But mental health wasn’t even a topic of discussion on her team.

“When we started reaching out for help, our coaches were laughing, saying, ‘Oh, girls are so dramatic, they need so much attention,’ and all that stuff,” she said. “‘All you need to do is work a bit harder so you don’t have time to [be] depressed.’”

With a year and a half left of high school and no more teammates, Kralikaite was thrown into a team of seniors. She was overwhelmed with excitement about the opportunity to train with the best athletes in Lithuania. But, she said, her new coaches’ views on mental health were the same.

“I really enjoyed it until I reached this point where I was just laying in bed and I was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with myself,’ ” she said.

Kralikaite didn’t talk to her teammates about it.

“When no one talks about it, it feels like it’s something you shouldn’t even think about,” she said. “It’s like, why would you bring this up even in your own head?”

Just before her senior year, she decided she needed a break. “I was quiet for months,” she said. “Never on my phone, never with my friends — just going to practice like a robot, literally having robotic movements, and going back to my bed to lie in silence — until I had to fully stop.”

Despite her coach’s efforts, she took time off of rowing. She spent “a few months barely rowing, barely being an athlete.” She knew that she needed a change.

Then, Kralikaite saw the Instagram message from Syracuse.

On her official visit, Kralikaite was “young and wide-eyed,” said women’s rowing head coach Luke McGee. He remembered that on her visit, Kralikaite had admired the Rowperfect rowing machines in the Sanford Training Center at Syracuse.

“I remember her walking over the machine and just being like, ‘Is it OK if I touch the machine?’” he laughed. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely, go ahead.’ I mean, I think the whole experience for her — the facilities and the campus and the opportunity — was really eye-opening and exciting for her.”

But the equipment wasn’t what drew Kralikaite in. “I didn’t feel like everyone was just trying to impress me,” she said. “Everyone was just doing their own thing — and I liked their own thing.”

As opposed to the more closed-off nature of her team in Lithuania, the Syracuse team has a much more holistic approach to coaching. McGee explained that rather than a secondary practice on Wednesdays, the coaches have an informal meeting with the team.

“I had the idea of, well, we could just break bread with them,” he said. “We could literally just give them bagels, cream cheese and coffee and we could sit around and just take some time and talk as a team.” These sessions, McGee said, build trust and give teammates a space to share their highs and lows with each other.

McGee emphasized the importance of encouraging success for the whole person, not just the athlete. “If you graduate in four years, and you’re only better at rowing, then we haven’t really done our job very well,” McGee said.

After committing to the Orange and returning home, knowing what she had to look forward to revitalized Kralikaite. “After I went back to Lithuania, that was my biggest motivation to somewhat keep going because I had this new chapter coming up, this new team coming up, and it felt so special,” she said. “I was struggling a lot. And then I got here.”

Kralikaite has continued to compete for Lithuania during her time at Syracuse. She’s rowed at the World Rowing U23 Championships in the women’s pair open event for the past three years, finishing second twice before winning the event last year with Syracuse teammate Martyna Kazlauskaite. This was capped by Kralikaite and Ieva Adomaviciute’s Olympic bid in September.

Adomaviciute, who has been rowing for almost two decades, only started training with Kralikaite a few months ago. After placing fifth at this year’s European Rowing Championships in the single event, she felt isolated. “I came from the competition and I felt so empty,” she said. “I just started to not enjoy doing the single.”

After missing the mark to qualify for World Championships in the single, her coach recommended she try a pair with Kralikaite. They trained together for a short period before competing at the Open Lithuanian U23 and Senior Championships, where they secured their place at World Championships in the pair event.

Adomaviciute said she admires Kralikaite’s positivity. “There are some things that I can really learn from her because she really believes in things,” she said. “Sometimes I’m more negative—I think maybe I don’t have that much patience. When we started rowing together, I thought, ‘It’s impossible [for us] to go to World Championships.’ And she always said she believed in us and we can do well.”

Kralikaite’s mentality shifted when she started rowing for Syracuse, Adomaviciute said. “She really had goals that she wanted to reach,” she said. “From last September, she believed that she would qualify for the Olympics, and then every day she was writing notes and she believed that she could do it. And she was working so hard for that.”

Now, being an Olympian — and almost reaching the Olympic podium — has shown Adomaviciute that she and Kralikaite truly have no limits.

“The most important thing in sports is to believe in yourself that you can do something,” she said. “I learned from [Kralikaite] to believe in your goals like you already have it.”

McGee noticed this shift as well.

“She’s a much different person than when she showed up,” he said. “It’s almost like that willingness to allow yourself to accept that rowing is fun again.”

He added that enjoying the sport was a pivotal piece of Kralilaite’s success, especially her Olympic qualification.

“In order to perform at that level, I mean, you have to love what you’re doing,” he said. “You have to feel supported.”

Kralikaite has always had her Orange teammates and coaches behind her.

“When I was away, I felt so much support from my teammates and my coaches,” she said. “Everyone was getting me so excited for races. And I would grab my phone after my final race and there would be hundreds of messages from the team.”

In her last season for the Orange this past spring, and as she prepared to compete at the Olympics, Kralikaite felt continued support by her SU team.

“It means so much when you are being told how to be a good person to your teammates, how to put your teammate before yourself,” she said. “It’s one of the greatest things I’ve learned and experienced in my life.”