Mahé Drysdale

Mahé Drysdale
	; Mahé Drysdale, 2010
Full name	Alexander Mahé Owens Drysdale
nation	New Zealand
birthday	November 19, 1978
place of birth	Melbourne , Australia
size	201 cm
Weight	100 kg
Career
discipline	Row , skull
society	West End Rowing Club
National squad	since 2002
status	active
Medal table
Olympic games
World championships
	Last change: August 14, 2016

Alexander Mahé Owens Drysdale , MNZM (born November 19, 1978 in Melbourne , Australia ) is a New Zealand rower . From 2005 to 2009 he was world champion in single rowing four times in a row and again in 2011 . At the 2012 Olympics in London and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro , he won the gold medal in the one after 2008 had already won the bronze medal in this competition class.

Career

Drysdale first took part in the Rowing World Cup in 2002 as a belt rower . At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens , he finished fifth with the New Zealand four-man without a helmsman . He then switched to the single and won the gold medal at the 2005 World Championships in Gifu , despite an injury that he sustained a few months earlier in a collision with a water skier. At the 2006 World Championships on Dorney Lake near Eton , the second world championship followed with a new world record.

In 2007 Drysdale won the third consecutive world title on the Oberschleißheim regatta course and seemed set for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing . But then he was surprisingly beaten in a club race by the Olympic gold medalist Rob Waddell , who had since retired and competed twice in the America's Cup as a sailor . A competition developed for the Olympic qualification for the place in the single, which Drysdale won in March 2008 with 2-1 victories. For the Olympic race in Beijing on August 16, 2008, Drysdale was weakened because he had previously suffered from a gastrointestinal infection. He could not live up to his role as favorite and won the bronze medal behind Olaf Tufte , who repeated his Olympic victory in 2004, and the Czech Ondřej Synek . Drysdale was the flag bearer of the New Zealand Olympic team at the 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

The duel between Drysdale and Synek then developed into a long-running hit. At the 2009 World Championships in Poznan , Drysdale's fourth world title in a row followed, with a new world record with 6: 33.35 minutes. Synek then beat Drysdale for the first time at the World Championships in his home country, but in 2011 Drysdale was again world champion and at the 2012 Summer Olympics he also won the gold medal as a favorite. The post-Olympic season 2013, in which he hardly trained, he finished with the elimination in the quarter-finals of the rowing world championships in South Korea. He then got back in and won the silver medal at the 2014 and 2015 World Championships behind Synek, who had won all of the world championship titles in the Olympic cycle. At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro , Drysdale also won gold after a photo finish with Croatian Damir Martin , who was rated at the same time as him, and third-placed Synek.

Private

Born in Australia, Drysdale grew up in Tauranga . When he studied accounting and business law at the University of Auckland , he began rowing at the relatively advanced age of 18. Due to the double burden of studying and part-time work as a bankruptcy advisor for an Australian auditing company, he initially did little rowing. However, after watching Rob Waddell's Olympic victory on television in 2000, he decided to take up targeted training. In 2001 he became a professional rower after graduating.

Drysdale has been married to former rower Juliette Haigh since 2013. The couple have a daughter who was born in October 2014.

Web links

Official website
Mahé Drysdale at Worldrowing.com ( FISA database )
Mahé Drysdale in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
Article on Mahé Drysdale - Sunday Star Times, July 20, 2008
Short biography ( Memento from October 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

↑ Skiffier Tufte triumphs again. In: www.nzz.ch. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 16, 2008, accessed on August 14, 2016 .

personal data
SURNAME	Drysdale, Mahe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Drysdale, Alexander Mahé Owens (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	New Zealand rower
DATE OF BIRTH	November 19, 1978
PLACE OF BIRTH	Melbourne , Australia

[1] Skiffier Tufte triumphs again. In: www.nzz.ch. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 16, 2008, accessed on August 14, 2016 .