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2025 Reading Season

Saratoga Reads Event to Feature Olympic Rower, Advocate for Women Athletes

Saratoga Reads will wrap up its 12th year of public programming with a special event featuring a conversation with author and Olympic rower Ginny Gilder on Tuesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall on the Skidmore College campus.

A reception will follow the event to celebrate a terrific 12th year of reading together as a community and the paperback release of Gilder’s book, Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX. The book will be offered for sale at the reception by Northshire Bookstore, and Gilder will be available to sign copies.

Gilder was a member of the American women’s quadruple sculls team that won the silver medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Eight years earlier, as a member of Yale University women’s crew team, she took part in a headline-grabbing protest that helped define the movement for equality in college sports.

The Gilder event is the culmination of a series of programs related to this year’s Saratoga Reads book of choice, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. Set during the Great Depression, the book tells the improbable story of how nine working-class young men from the University of Washington in Seattle competed for the Gold Medal in rowing at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, challenging the German boat rowing for Adolf Hitler.

Forty years later, in 1976, a very different rowing-related drama played out as Gilder and other members of the women’s rowing team at Yale staged a “naked protest” to demonstrate against substandard, demeaning training conditions and equipment. In addition to improving their own lot, they were hoping to further the cause of Title IX, the 1972 legislation that requires gender equity in educational programs that receive federal funding.

“The law of the land may have stated that female athletes were due equal rights on the playing field, but these women knew otherwise,” said a 2012 article on the protest in the Boston Globe. “Too often, cloaked in sweat-drenched clothes after workouts, the women waited outside in the wintry cold while the men’s crew showered, a bus eventually arriving to shuttle both squads back to the New Haven campus. ‘Sweathogs,’ some of Yale’s inconsiderate male rowers called them.”

Growing impatient with promises of improvements, the women decided to take action. One afternoon prior to practice Gilder and her crewmates made their way to the office of Joni Barnett, director of women’s athletics at Yale. In unison they shed their sweatshirts and sweat pants and stood naked, covered only by the inscription “Title IX” that they had inked across one another’s backs and chests. Their prepared statement read in part, “These are the bodies Yale is exploiting. We have come here today to make clear how unprotected we are, to show graphically what we are being exposed to…”

To increase their impact, the protestors had arranged for the presence of photographer Nina Haight and writer David Zweig, executive editor of the Yale Daily News and also a stringer for the New York Times, who sat in a chair with his back to the nude women. Not surprisingly, the protest drew wide media attention.

Wrote Steven Wulf of ESPN Magazine, “By the next year, a women’s locker room was added to the boathouse….Even more wonderfully, the cause of Title IX suddenly had a rallying cry that resonated with other women on other campuses.”

Continuing with her rowing career after Yale, Gilder represented the U.S. on four national rowing teams, including two Olympic teams. She was named to the U.S. team that boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games and the 1984 team that competed in Los Angeles. She holds a pair of international medals, a bronze from the 1983 World Championships in the single, and a silver from the L.A. Olympics.

The conversation with Gilder will be moderated by Skidmore Professor Jeffrey Segrave, a noted expert on sports and society and the Olympic Games. His areas of study include the politics of the winter Olympic Games, the use of sport metaphors, and women in sport. He has lectured and written widely on the modern Olympic movement and is the editor of two books on the Olympics, The Olympic Games in Transition and Olympism.

“Reading The Boys in the Boat has inspired a tremendous amount of conversation throughout our community. Adults and children, rowers and non-rowers, men and women have rallied around this book,” said Tabitha Orthwein, chair of the Saratoga Reads board.

Added Orthwein, “Together we have learned about the world of rowing, taken a glimpse of sport and politics just prior to World War II, and learned of the substantial presence of rowing in Saratoga Springs. Now we have the opportunity to hear firsthand from a Title IV advocate, Olympian, and author to tie these many conversations together.”