In between packing up all his belongings in his room, Robert Tiemeijer found the time to visit the Thêta boathouse for an interview. This week, he is moving from an Eindhoven student house where he lives with rower Lisa Scheenaard, to a rowing house in Berkeley, California. His furniture and boxes will be put into storage and in six months, when he returns from his internship in the United States, he hopes to move into another room in Eindhoven for the final stretch of his physics program.

He has not yet packed away the gold medal he won in China at the Universiade this summer. He has brought it with him and patiently shows it to any Thêta member who wishes to see it. He carefully takes it out, passes it around, and carefully puts it back again; this happens several times. Everyone is in awe of the medal and Robert readily explains that it contains three grams of real gold, which is worth quite a bit. But the medal means much more to him; it is his greatest achievement. “It doesn’t get better than this.”

Relief

What the world title symbolizes for Robert above all is relief with a capital R. “I was supposed to go in 2021. But because it was to take place in China in the middle of the Covid-19 period it was postponed. The next year I had qualified again, and again it was canceled. Now, in 2023, it was finally allowed to take place. It was my last chance, because by the next Universiade I will be too old to compete (maximum age 26, Ed.). That period of uncertainty is now over and I’m happy we got to wrap it up in such a great way.” Together with seven other rowing students from other universities (“plus a coxswain, also a student”) Robert rowed their boat to victory from his position as bowman. They managed to row two thousand meters in just five and a half minutes (5:35.60).

The Eindhoven native has been training at Thêta since his last year of secondary school. He started to get really serious about rowing when, as a first-year Applied Physics student, he won all the races in the Development classification of the Dutch Rowing Federation. “That was also the first time I was sent abroad. I got to compete in the European Universities Games in Coimbra, Portugal.” Because of his relatively slender build (1.93 m tall and 85 kilos) and technical prowess, Robert’s position in the boat is in the bow seat on the starboard side. “That means I have the oar on my left.”

Parties

With Robert leaving for the United States, he will sadly miss out on his official celebration ceremony organized by the student rowing association. The ceremony will also honor the achievements of Noortje Wilms, who secured a silver medal, and Vera Sneijders, who earned a bronze medal at the World Rowing Under 23 Championships in Bulgaria.

Robert has often attended the annual parties dubbed “In-training” and “Out-training”. These parties mark the rowing periods, and the In-training party is a bit like Carnival. “It’s the last time you drink alcohol before you start living super healthy for six months. Some people will drink so much that they don’t even feel like having a beer for six months afterwards. But those are mostly first-years. Most people stop doing that when they get a little older,” he says with a smile. Out-training parties take place after the last race of the season, the name says it all.

• Did you know that Thêta’s origins can be traced back to Demos and E.S.C?  The student rowing association was founded on October 8, 1975 as a merger between E.S.R. Tachos (founded in 1960 as a sub-association of the E.S.C by the son of Dorgelo, our first Rector Magnificus) and D.R.V. Telamon (founded in 1965 by Demos members who were not admitted to E.S.R. Tachos).
   
• Did you know that Thêta has its own rowing boat company called Botenwagen Compagnie that still transport boats for many associations throughout the Netherlands to this day?
   
• Did you know that Thêta participated in the prestigious and long-standing Henley Royal Regatta in England as early as 1990? It wasn’t until this year that they got to compete again. 
   
• Did you know that Thêta’s first appearance at the Olympics was in Sydney in 2000? Thêta member Dirk Lippits won a silver medal in the quadruple sculls. “Disillusioned with coming in second place (in rowing, not finishing first is often considered losing, after all), he decided to hang this silver medal as a flush pull cord for the classically high-hanging cistern to flush the toilet at rowing house Tachos, where Dirk lived at the time,” says Fabian Lucas Luijckx, president of Thêta. “Even after Dirk left the house, this prestigious medal continued to hang there for quite some time, until Dirk’s girlfriend at the time ordered him to go pick it up after all.”

• Did you know that Thêta also performed well at the most recent Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021? Lisa Scheenaard (Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences alumna) secured a bronze medal in the double sculls and Sander de Graaf (Mechanical Engineering alumnus) took sixth place in the coxless four.
   
• Did you know that this summer’s World Rowing Under 23 Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria brought even more medals for Thêta members? Silver for Architecture student Noortje Wilms, bronze for Vera Sneijders (Biomedical Engineering student at TU/e) and a fifth place for bowman Olle van Bohemen (pre-master’s student Mechanical Engineering at TU/e). And at the European Under 23 Championships in Krefeld, Germany, TU/e Applied Mathematics student Emanuele Bergamin won a gold medal.