After watching her brother row in the 2016 and 2020 Summer Olympic games, former Washington State women's rower, Ieva Adomavičiūtė, will be fulfilling her own dream of becoming an Olympic athlete later this month in Women's Pair at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.

Adomavičiūtė, a Kaunas, Lithuania native, rowed with WSU from 2012-17 and helped the team to NCAA Championship appearances in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. During that time, she also competed at the national level with her home country.

"I learned so many different things," Adomavičiūtė said of her time as a Coug. "For example, the simplest thing is we didn't even know what foam rolling was in Lithuania, so learning all those little details was important."
Before coming to the Palouse, she won gold in Women's Double Sculls in both 2011 and 2012 at the Junior World Championships, and then after NCAA runs at WSU, won gold in single sculls at the U-23 World Championships in 2015 and 2016.

Adomavičiūtė added one more gold to her collection in 2018 in the Women's Double Sculls at the World Championships, and now she looks ahead to becoming the fifth Cougar in program history to compete in the Olympics with the 2024 Summer Games approaching.

After graduating from WSU and competing in the World Championships, she switched coaches in 2022 and decided to go all-in towards the goal of qualifying for the 2024 Olympics, but the skills she learned in Pullman still impact her in the water.

"I used to be the only girl on our team in Lithuania," said Adomavičiūtė. "Then when I went to the US and Washington State, there were maybe 60 or more girls. And for me it was so weird, but learning how to be on a big team with a lot of girls was a good lesson to just learn teamwork. And the best lesson was to row with other girls and try to be fast in any combination."

Since working under a returning coach, Mykolas Masilionis who she had previously worked with from 2017 to 2020, Adomavičiūtė has been training with the hopes of competing in the Olympics.

"I knew the coach really well and I knew that with him we wouldn't have many days off, maybe every second or third Sunday, and we knew that this time would be really intense," Adomavičiūtė said. "My brother told me any coach you have, you have to believe in, because if you don't believe in your coach you will never do well."

Adomavičiūtė's brother, and former Olympian Aurimas Adomavičiusand, has been a large part of her success, always being there to give advice and important input.

"He helps me a lot because every time I talk with him or something happens, he knows very well what it feels like to be in this environment and how it feels to be an athlete," Adomavičiūtė said. "He supports me a lot if I have really hard days. I would say he helps me more than my coach some days because he can tell me things from that athlete's perspective. Every time we talk about the Olympics, he tells me you have to go, you have to feel that feeling, so I'm really excited because from how he tells me, it seems very special."

Now over the past year, Adomavičiūtė and her rowing partner Kamile Kralikaitė have trained for the Women's Pair event any way they could, first helping Lithuania qualify a Women's Pair boat in the 2024 Olympics with their performance at the 2023 World Championships when they raced in a pair.

"The boat was qualified last year at the World Championship, so me and my partner, we qualified, but it qualified a boat for the country, not us as individuals," said Adomavičiūtė. "Before last year's World Championship, I didn't sweep even once. I was only sculling, so that was also challenging."

After that, their focus quickly shifted from getting Lithuania a qualified boat, to getting themselves qualified to be the women's pair rowing in it in Paris. Although, it would be a unique path from there.

The very next day after they qualified a boat for their country, Kralikaitė flew out to the US where she was finishing her senior year at Syracuse, so the pair hoping to row in the 2024 Olympics together had to spend the year training on different sides of the globe.

"It was actually really weird because it's difficult in Lithuania to find other girls to row a pair, so I just raced mostly as a single," Adomavičiūtė said.

She raced a single in the World Cup and did well, showing she can put up a fast time on a larger stage, but there was still the unknown of how that would translate back to racing in a pair.

While Kralikaitė continued to compete collegiately, Adomavičiūtė also continued to work with coach Masilionis in Lithuania, both in the boat, and on ergometer rowing machines.

One day after rowing hard on the water the day before, her coach surprised her with the challenge to row a 6K and a 2K on the rowing machine at racing level. Despite her body being tired from the day before, she set the world record in both distances for the fastest erg score on slides at 6:22.00 in the 2K, and 20:46.10 in the 6K.

"We had just trained with a hard practice the day before and we didn't do anything to be specifically ready, but he wanted us to do it tired," said Adomavičiūtė. "Our coach didn't tell us that he was going to give us a test."

Training continued with her coach until her rowing partner Kralikaitė returned in early June and they were able to resume training as a true pair, which also meant adjusting to working under Lithuanian Olympic coach Virgaudas Leknickas, instead of with each of their respective individual coaches.

"When my pair partner came back and we tried pair again, it was so much better than last year so we're excited to see what we can do," Adomavičiūtė said.

Despite having trained individually for nine months, their time as a double did improve over the previous September. At the 2024 Amber Oars regatta, an annual regatta hosted in Trakai, Lithuania, Adomavičiūtė and Kralikaitė advanced to the Women's Pair finals and won gold in the event in 7:50.22, more than an entire minute faster than the second-place boat (8:56.39).

Now all that's left for the duo is to compete at the Olympic Games as they plan to travel to Paris on July 19 after having had only eight weeks to train together since Kralikaitė returned.

"Officially it's my first Olympics, but it feels like it's not," Adomavičiūtė said. "We're going with the highest goals to not only compete, but do really well and surprise the world. For so many years everyone has called me an Olympian even though I had never raced at the Olympics, so finally now it will be true."

The 2024 Olympic Summer games in Paris will be held July 26-August 11. The rowing events are set for July 27-August 3 with the medal events taking place the final four days, July 31-August 3.

For more information on the WSU women's rowing team, follow @WSUCougarRowing on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.