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Review: The Four-Year Olympian: A Journey from First Rowing Stroke to Olympic Podium in Less Than Four Years

The Four-Year Olympian: A Journey from First Rowing Stroke to Olympic Podium in Less Than Four Years The Four-Year Olympian: A Journey from First Rowing Stroke to Olympic Podium in Less Than Four Years by Jeremiah F. Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Four-Year Olympian was a thoroughly enjoyable book that remained engrossing the whole way through. The blurb on the back cover is extremely accurate in its declaration of the inspirational and uplifting nature of this book. From Jeremiah’s upbringing, to his involvement in varsity football, to his rowing career, to his Olympic medal and beyond, this book shows us what it takes to become an Olympic medalist.

That free two chapter sampler on Netgalley had me hooked SO FAST. So disclaimer: I received a free e-arc from Dundurn Press via Netgalley, but all opinions remain my own. The book starts off with a little anecdote from Jeremiah’s childhood, and even though it had nothing to do with sports or rowing it completely engrossed me, and that has got to tell you something. The stories were interesting and easily pulled me along. I wasn’t expecting the writing to be anything more than mediocre, but I ended up quite liking it, except for the insanely high amount of times I had to read the word “pussy” being used as an expletive. That got a bit excessive.

As someone who is aiming to compete in the Olympics someday myself, I was quite interested in what the actual journey to that point might look like. For Jeremiah it essentially boiled down to:
1. Have good genes
2. Move to the city where the national team of your preferred sport trains and join them
3. Go hard, bitch.
I’m not going to lie, I was pretty disappointed with step number two because I don’t want to leave my home, though it makes sense you should train with and be trained by the elite.

I’d say most of the book was probably focused on step three, or at least that’s where the most emphasis was put. I had no idea what masochists rowers are until I read this book. I have definitely thought about how I don’t get how people would enjoy just rowing on those machines all day (because we live in Canada, they can’t be on the lake all the time. It's cold), but I never knew just how bad it really is. And that the machines aren’t even necessarily the worst part. Long story short: Rowing is literally just prolonged consensual torture, so props to the people who put themselves through it. Though honestly I feel like I could say that about a lot of sports, including my own (running), but I still say rowing has got it worse.

The ending was very feel-good and satisfying, which I could somewhat see coming since I went into the book already knowing that Jeremiah and his team get an Olympic medal out of it. Honestly though, I was still kind of shocked when they were able to pull it off, and I still don’t understand how they did it, because they seemed pretty shit in all their races leading up to the final but somehow managed to pull through anyway. I guess “shit” is subjective, because a shitty athlete doesn’t make it to the Olympics in the first place. It’s just that it didn’t seem like they could actually pull off placing, so even though I knew it was coming it still felt very sweet.

The only thing is then the epilogue comes and poops on the party. It’s about how Jeremiah got depression after losing his sense of purpose from working for 3.5 years and achieving his goal. On the one hand it’s really good to bring attention to these type of issues that affect athletes, but on the other it honestly just dampened my mood towards the book and my own Olympic goal. I think it was a good inclusion to the book, however I didn’t personally enjoy reading it. But you know, that doesn’t really matter. Reality hurts, and as Jeremiah would say, “stop being a pussy”.

Overall this was a great book. I really want to buy it and have a physical copy for myself because I would love to read it again, and there are a lot of inspiring quotes in here that I would love to bookmark. I also loved the inclusion of photographs, my only complaint is that I wish there were more!


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