Legally Bond
Bond in Paris, Part One
In this special summer series of Legally Bond, Kim talks with Bond higher education and Title IX attorney and Olympic Gold Medalist Kristen Thorsness. Kris is traveling to the 2024 Paris Olympics as part of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) Ad Hoc Division. Part one of this series is a discussion of Kris's journey to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and how she joined CAS as an arbitrator.
In this special summer series of Legally Bond, Kim talks with Bond higher education and Title IX attorney and Olympic Gold Medalist Kristen Thorsness. Kris is traveling to the 2024 Paris Olympics as part of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) Ad Hoc Division. Part one of this series is a discussion of Kris's journey to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and how she joined CAS as an arbitrator.
Hello and welcome to Legally Bond, a podcast presented by the law firm Bond Shettick King. I'm your host, Kim Wolfe-Price. Today we have the start of a special series, a summer series, one that celebrates the nexus between the law and sport and, in particular, the Olympic Games. To do that, we are speaking with Kristen Thorsness, of counsel in Bond's Rochester office, practicing in the area of higher education and particularly Title IX, which is, as many of you know, part of the Education Act. Chris is an Olympic gold medalist and will be in Paris for the Summer Games in a very unique role.
Speaker 1:Hey, Chris, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Hi, it's great to be back. Well, it's great to have you with us today in this kickoff of our summer series, and we're recording several episodes about the nexus of sport and law, so I guess we should start with the athlete part, if that's okay. So I mentioned you're an Olympic gold medalist, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say the distinction of the only Olympic gold medalist at Bunch of the King. So can we talk a little bit about that? How did you get involved with sports? And then, particularly, I'd like to talk about rowing, which is the sport where you were able to be on the gold medal team.
Speaker 2:I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. I had two older brothers. We always were doing things outdoors with my family. We did, you know, hiking and fishing and all kinds of things like that, and my brothers played a lot of sports, starting as early with Little and then going on up, but they were both very good athletes. We inherited some really outstanding genetics from my parents. So they I had these great role models to follow, and of course I was that, that bothersome little sister who wants to do everything that her big brothers do. And so as soon as I was able, I started playing organized sports. For me that wasn't until seventh grade, because back then they just didn't have the kind of sports programs for girls that they did for boys. And you know, and I just I always just loved playing games, playing sports, particularly team sports. I really don't enjoy individual sports much, and so I loved being a part of a team. So basketball and volleyball and doubles, tennis and those sorts of things really appealed to me.
Speaker 1:That's great, and so all of that sport as your background right and as your childhood. How does that lead you to a US national team and the Olympics with rowing?
Speaker 2:It was a crazy process. And my national team coach the first time I made the national team, my dad was talking to him and said gee, we're really surprised that Kristen was able to do this. My coach said no more surprised than I was. So my older brother rowed when he was in college and when I was heading off to college he knew that the University of Wisconsin had a really good women's rowing program and he said hey, you know, why don't you go out for rowing? He said you're kind of small but you've got a good head for it. And so I showed up at the organizational meeting. There were 150 women there. We had no cuts, and when we went off to nationals the following spring there were 12 rowers and two coxswains left. People just self-selected out, because if you know anything about rowing, you know that there's a lot of hard work and sometimes in inclement weather In early mornings.
Speaker 2:I believe that too, that too, but I just was hooked from almost the first day. I like to joke that rowing is a cult, that it sucks you in and takes over your life, and it really did with me. I was, I just I couldn't get enough. I loved being outside, I loved being on the water, I loved being part of a team, you know, because, especially like in a rowing boat, everyone has to sublimate themselves into this single entity. You know this giant water bug looking like thing, and if and if they're not willing to do that, that boat is not going to go fast, no matter how strong the individuals are.
Speaker 2:And that really appealed to me in a big way. It really resonated with me, and I love the way that it rewarded hard work, because I wasn't a particularly gifted athlete. I have sort of an extraordinarily efficient cardiovascular system Thanks mom and dad and I have a head of solid, concrete Thanks mom and dad. And so the combination of those two things really set me up for success in rowing, because it's really a lot about working hard, day after day after day, enjoying the grind. I love the training More than the racing. I love the training.
Speaker 1:It sounds a little weirdly like law practice, but go ahead.
Speaker 2:It is. It's a lot, I mean actually, you know it. Really it worked well. When I stopped rowing and started practicing law, I kind of went from one high-intensity pursuit into another and they both kind of keyed on some of my own psychological oddities that made me well-suited for both. So, yeah, so that's how I originally got into it.
Speaker 2:I just loved it and just kept coming back and our coach used to make us do the national team testing. They had these three sets of testings each year, so one Saturday we'd be down at the boathouse suffering all morning doing these tests. In the fall of my senior year, my coach came into the boathouse one day after practice and I was sitting with some of my teammates and she said, well, hey, they've set the date for the December national team testing. You guys sign up for times. I was like what, why, why should I waste a perfectly good Saturday morning when I don't have a prayer of making the national team?
Speaker 2:This is the coach who used to call me the stump because I'm just too small and I'd been told by some very good coaches repeatedly that I was too small, I would never do anything. So she kind of gave me this kind of confused look small, I would never do anything. So she kind of gave me this kind of confused look and there was a woman who had rode previously at Wisco and who was also an Olympian named Peggy McCarthy, who was my size, and so my coach looked at me and she said well, if McCarthy could do it, you could do it, and it was just like that proverbial light bulb moment.
Speaker 2:You know, I just was like really Never thought it was possible. Yeah, I mean I just never thought it was possible. I mean I was very successful at the college level, I was always in the varsity boat and all this stuff, but it just didn't really occur to me that that was a possibility. I grew up watching the Olympics as a little kid and I thought it was like the best thing a person could do in the world and you know. But it was so beyond the realm of possibility for me that I never thought it would happen to me. I used to send $5 to the Olympic Committee and they'd send me a little patch. I still have those patches and I was particularly fit at that time and did really well in that first round of testing and got the attention of the national team coaches and then got invited to some camps and ended up actually making my first national team that year.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. I mean I love about that story the power of like one coach, one mentor, one teacher just giving that little push like why not, it's really, that's an important thing, right? She set you on a whole different path.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and she'd been on the national team herself.
Speaker 1:She was 6'2". She had that credibility to you. She was 6'2", you are not 6'2" I am not 6'2".
Speaker 2:When I was competing I was 5'9. In the morning if I stood up really tall and wore socks, they used to pat me on the head. Vatican, they'd say.
Speaker 1:Right, because most growers are six feet or so. Yeah, I'm too small. Well turns out, not true? I think the gold medal speaks otherwise. So then, that's how you propelled on into the national team, was going out for that tryout and your Olympics were Los Angeles 1984. Is that?
Speaker 2:what it was my first Olympics. I was injured the second time around in 88, so I didn't get to race, so 84 was the big games for me.
Speaker 1:Well, it was a big game because it was the first time US women's rowing won a gold medal, and it was on the home turf.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I remember watching those games so vividly as a kid, being so excited about those games.
Speaker 2:LA just did a wonderful job with those games and from an athlete's perspective it was just fantastic. And being in front of a home crowd for that big of an event was really unusual for us, because usually you go to a regatta and there's, you know, half a basically, and and you go to the world championships in in europe and there's thousands of spectators right. But having that kind of environment back in the united states was really different and extra special because when we went up to get our medals, in front of the grandstands there were a lot of people I knew and my parents were there and my brother, who got me into the sport, who'd never seen me row oh my gosh. So the only time he ever saw me row was at the Olympics in the finals when we won our gold medal.
Speaker 1:That's how we row every time. No, we're perfect.
Speaker 2:It actually wasn't our best race but we got it done, no no, we knew we were very fast from the beginning and we went over to europe and raced all the top teams and won. And so we came back to the olympics favorite to win, which was crazy position, just imagine. You know, anything short of an olympic gold medal is failure. Right, it was hot. It was about 100 degrees. That day we had just emptied our water bottles because you don't want to carry that extra weight in the race.
Speaker 2:When they announced there was a delay, and so we had to sit around for about a half an hour more out on the water just trying to stay loose, but all the time sort of dehydrating. And of course, you know, once the race got started, you know the Romanians, who were just incredible athletes and we just we loved them, they loved us because they just you could just tell that they just worked really hard and all of us disliked the Soviets, so it was, it was a bonding thing and but you know, we were really kind of paying attention to what they were doing and not so much what was happening in our boat, paying attention to what they were doing and not so much what was happening in our boat. And so we were just neck and neck all the way down the race course and, with about 200, 250 meters to go, our coxswain just refocused us.
Speaker 2:You know and that's the beauty of a really good coxswain right, and you can see, all of a sudden we just start to march away, ended up winning by half a length.
Speaker 2:These are 60-foot boats, so yeah, so that's a lot, yeah, yeah, we just, we just we just marched away from them and I really I give a lot of that credit to our coxswain because she, she knew what to do at the time and she did it. And because, you know, the coxswain has to be able to reach these eight individuals who are, as I say, deep in the pain cave, deep in oxygen debt, and she has to be able to talk to them and be heard. But then also how to reach each of the different individuals right, and so she's sort of half psychiatrist, half coach, half something else, and I know those don't add up right, but a good coxswain is very literally worth her weight in gold.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's pretty amazing, right, like just be able to like get everyone focus and go half a boat is a big margin it was about 30 feet, yeah something like that. Yeah, I mean from the races I've watched, like either like in college when I'd go to see friends row, or on the olympics, that's.
Speaker 2:You know, I lost a national championship by about an inch one time. And so yeah, yeah, wow, that's what it's, just a special group.
Speaker 1:It really was they were.
Speaker 2:I think I was the youngest one in the boat and clearly the most immature, you know, and I was rowing with these gods of my sport. People ask me well, what were you thinking about? You know, like I didn't want to let my teammates down because they were gods.
Speaker 2:You know I didn't want to do something stupid and but it all worked out well. Well, it seems like, then, us rowing is sort of in your blood. Are you still active in some ways in US rowing? I serve on the US Rowing Referee Committee and so I referee as well, and then I also got involved with the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee a few years ago and I am an arbitrator for them, so I do arbitrations. I just did one last week, an Olympic team selection dispute, and so I sat as arbitrator in that. We had a six-hour video hearing on July 5th and so, yeah, so I still try to stay involved and, you know, to give back to a sport and the Olympic movement that were really good to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's fantastic, and I mean. What I love here is that we should talk about this the switch from so from US rowing to law school and and Title IX work Cause that'll lead us to Paris, I think, in a way. So, so you're us rowing, you're in college, and then suddenly it's law school at some point and title nine. Do you want to give us a short version of how that happened?
Speaker 2:Well, my dad and my my brother are both lawyers. Okay, so we used to joke that it was a genetic defect in our family, one of the few professions that was legal that matched up with all of our strange personality traits. So being a lawyer was something that I had been thinking about since I was in junior high or high school, and I spent two and a half of my three years of law school while I was still training. So once I retired after the Olympics in 1988, I just had one semester left to go in law school. So I just went back to Boston, got my shoulder fixed again and then did my last semester of law school and graduated and started being a lawyer.
Speaker 1:You water sport. Folks always have shoulders that you need repaired Swimmers and rowers. All right. So then law practice, and you mentioned some of the arbitration work that you do for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, but that's not how you're going to Paris. There's a group called the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Can you preview this a little bit for us?
Speaker 2:Sure thing. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, shorthand CAS, was originally founded by the International Olympic Committee back in the 80s to provide a relatively quick and efficient means for resolving sport-related disputes. At that time it was limited to the Olympic family, so all of the Olympic sports at both their national and the international level. And then it broke off from the IOC in the early 90s to become freestanding and now also CASS, basically arbitration clauses, just like you see in a lot of contracts In the sporting area, a lot of arbitration clauses now will say that any disputes will be adjudicated before cas. So, for instance, fifa and uefa yeah, they all they do all of their dispute resolution through cas and so, and also all of the world and national anti-doping agencies and everything. So it's really international. Less active in the US because our professional sporting leagues the NFL, nba, major League, baseball they use different dispute resolution processes. So CAS has really grown.
Speaker 2:There are about 400 CAS arbitrators worldwide and they are people who have backgrounds in law, of course, but then also have been at high levels of sports administration. So maybe on governing bodies of national sports agencies or their own national Olympic committees, they were high level officiating experience nationally or internationally. Or and this is just a few of us they competed at the elite level internationally as an athlete, and so that's how I got picked. I was just home one day and the phone rang and it was this nice guy calling to say hey, you know, we heard about you and would you be interested in talking about becoming an arbitrator for Cass. I was amazed and thrilled to hear about it, and we talked for about an hour and a half about all the things that Cass does and the potential of going to the Olympics, and after about an hour and a half of this, he started to laugh and I said what's so funny? He said well, you haven't asked what it pays. I said oh, it pays.
Speaker 1:I remember I was an Olympian in rowing before I didn't know this paying thing was a thing.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, and it's the sort of thing that it's so interesting and it's so exciting that you know, don't tell them this, but I do it for free. If they feed me and put me up, I'm there. So one of the things that CAS does is lends a group of arbitrators 12 or 15, to the International Olympic Committee for the Olympics. We go to the Winter Olympics, the Summer Olympics, we go to the Commonwealth Games, we go to the Pan Ams, so that there are a group of people who are well-versed in sport and law, who are on site ready to go, because oftentimes, particularly at something like the Olympics, something will come up in the midst of competition and so it needs to be resolved really quickly, within 24, 48 hours.
Speaker 2:And so the Russian figure skater, ms Valieva, at the Beijing Games, her positive test from several months earlier was reported literally in between the time that the team competition concluded and the medal ceremony that evening. Right? So when you get a positive test under international doping rules, you are automatically suspended. You get a provisional suspension and then this process has to go through before your suspension can be lifted. The presumed penalty on a doping event is four years. So she was supposed to compete in a few days in the women's singles event. And so the RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency, conducted a hearing, I think the next day, and decided to lift the provisional suspension. And she at that time was arguing that she'd received this substance, which is most commonly seen as a heart medicine, but it has a bunch of different benefits for an athlete. It's the same, actually, substance that these Chinese swimmers you may have read about recently that they tested positive for TMZ. So anyway, they decided that it had been her consumption of it had been inadvertent. So they lifted the suspension Immediately.
Speaker 2:The IOC, the International Skating Union and some others peeled that decision to Cass. Okay, so the Cass ad hoc court, which is what they're called at the Olympics, was right there. They did briefing over the course of one day. They, as I understand it, they convened the hearing at 8 o'clock or 8.30 at night and they went until 2.30 the next morning listening to witnesses and testimony, that sort of thing, and by noon had issued an operative award that is a sort of a short form award, agreeing with the decision to lift the suspension for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2:And it was a very controversial decision. But she was allowed to compete then, but she didn't do very well. She was expected to win the women's singles and she she fell a couple of times and finished fourth. And there were these horrible videos of her coach excoriating her as she came off the ice, crying, but anyway, that was a Cass matter. It's still going on, actually, but through the courts and through Cass, and it actually went to the courts. Now it's back to Cass and so that story is not over and the medals in that event have still not been awarded.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's wild Right. And the medals in that event have still not been awarded. Wow, that's wild right. Because I mean, if we think about it in a typical legal litigation sense, that's still short, that's not all right, that's right.
Speaker 2:You know it feels like it's been forever, but really, if it were litigation, we'd be just kind of getting warmed up.
Speaker 1:We'd just be getting going. Well, I think that's where we should maybe pause this episode and it's a little bit of a preview, because then we can come back and talk about Harris this summer. Okay, sounds great. Thanks so much, chris. We'll talk again very soon. Okay, thank you for tuning into this episode of Legally Bond. If you're listening and have any questions for me, want to hear from someone at the firm or have a suggestion for a future topic, please email us at legallybondedbskcom. Also, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to Legally Bond wherever podcasts are downloaded. Until our next talk, be well.