Coach Ted Bonanno, who has been training six Indian rowers at Felician College this summer, has announced that Inderpal Singh and Kasam Kahn have been selected to represent their nation in the 2000 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Sydney Australia from September 15 – October 1.

In announcing the selection, Ted Bonanno says that he is “very pleased with the performance of Inderpal and Kasam and that they are clearly the best that India had to offer.” The team of six competed in the U.S. National Club Championships in Syracuse, New York, where Inderpal and Kasam were part of the 4-man Crew Team to finish first in the Senior Four Oared competition. The two followed that victory by competing in Canada in the Grand Finals of the Pairs Oared competition where they finished 4th out of twenty-two teams competing.

Felician College was home this summer to the original team of six Indian rowers vying to become one of the pair to head to the Olympics. Each morning at dawn and each afternoon, the six rowers and their coaches walked the half mile from the campus to the Passaic River to complete a rigorous training regimen under the direction of Bonanno, head rowing coach for Fordham University and former National Team Coach for the Puerto Rican and Guatemalan Olympic Rowing Teams.

The remaining members of the Indian National Rowing Team, Rampal Singh, Sarwan Singh, Surinder Singh, and Johnson Xavier and their coaches Chacko Kandathil, and Ismail Baig,, returned to India where they continue training for the 2001 Asian Rowing Championships.