Two days after winning the Women’s Four repechage heat, Mac alum Knifton (Class of 2018) and her three American teammates will race in the event final at 4:50 a.m. CST Thursday (broadcast on E!). 

Needing to place in the top two in Tuesday’s repechage to advance to tomorrow’s women’s four final, the U.S. boat edged China to win the heat. By placing first, Kate and her teammates became the first American crew to make it to the W4 final since the event was reinstated at Tokyo games four years ago. 

 “Winning yesterday definitely gave them a confidence boost,” said Kristin Koenig Brewer, Kate’s mom who is also in Paris to watch her daughter race for her country.

While the victory was no doubt a reason to believe in Team USA, so too was the fact that the team’s time in completing the 2,000-meter course (6:32.48) shaved more than 17 seconds off the time the team posted in Sunday’s qualifying heat 1 (6:49.66). The time was also more than 10 seconds faster than any time of any of the nine boats in the competition.

What caused the drastic improvement? 

“I think our boat does the best when it’s do or die,” Knifton told John FX Flynn of row2k.com. “We know what we have to do. It’s really special to be able to trust your boat completely and know that it’s not just you creating a rhythm alone. It’s the whole boat doing it. Everyone seems really cool under pressure, and we really rise to the occasion as a group.”

Knifton’s teammate, Kelsey Reelick of Brookfield, Conn., credited the team’s rhythm as the key to its improvement. Knifton bears great responsibility for setting the pace of the boat by determining the stroke rate from the stroke seat of the boat.

“It was so solid,” Reelick said of the team’s performance. “I felt like that was the best piece that we’ve put together so far. The cadence was high, but it felt like it was low. We were pushing together. It was long. It was controlled. It felt like we were just doing our thing in the boat solo, and the other boats around us were doing their things, but we were all working as one. That base is what we’ve been looking for.” 

In addition to being pressure performers that worked well together, the team of four also approached their second race with a different philosophy and a different strategy.

The philosophy: keep the focus inside the boat.

“We were more focused on the type of race we wanted to have inside the gunnels as opposed to what was going on around us,” Knifton’s Team USA (and former UT) teammate Daisy Mazzio-Manson of Craftsbury, Vt., told Flynn. 

And the strategy they wanted to focus on executing? 

“We tried to be more aggressive,” said Emily Kallfelz, who occupies the bow seat and therefore also performs the role of a coxswain, since there isn’t one in women’s four. 

Kallflelz said the team might have been a bit hesitant to go all out on Sunday because of their relative inexperience as a team.

“We haven’t had a ton of races together, and at these international races, people take off and don’t look back. We were trying to tailor our race a little bit more so that we were in it.”

So the team raced better because of the team’s competitive fire, greater familiarity with each other and because they pushed themselves harder.

Anything else? 

Kate’s dad, Matt Knifton, a UT rower himself back in the day and the owner of the Texas Rowing Center where his daughter got her start in rowing, said that the team benefited from the more favorable wind conditions on Tuesday. On Sunday, the team raced into a headwind, and on Tuesday the wind was neutral. 

Because the rowers in the Team USA boat are relatively light, Matt said that the ideal wind would be a tailwind that moves in the same direction as the boat. 

He is hopeful that the wind blows in Team USA’s favor in tomorrow’s final.

What else will be different?

The competition will be more fierce with Sunday heat winners Great Britain (lane 3) and the Netherlands (lane 4), joining Sunday qualifiers New Zealand (lane 2) and Romania (lane 5) and Tuesday qualifiers China (lane 1) and Team USA (lane 6) in one final face for gold, silver and bronze. 

According to Koenig Brewer, one of Kate’s coaches urged the team to trust their superior fitness and go for broke.

Kallfelz echoed the sentiment.

“[The final] will be hotter, obviously, and a lot of really strong crews,” she said. “We’re just going to be aggressive as we can be and see what shakes out.”