The old joke about rowing, Lauren O’Connor said, is that it’s the only sport to have roots as a form of corporal punishment.
“You could go to prison, or you could row on the boats that were taking people across the ocean and doing this really, really hard labor,” she said.
O’Connor, who is from the village of Belleville — population 2,591 — is one of four women from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will be competing in rowing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.