International Competitions
Internationally, Wetzel competed for the United States team in 1999 (Coxed Four (4+) gold medal at the World Championships in St. Catherines) and in 2000 (7th place with the Quad (4x) at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney). In 1999, Wetzel was one of the principal subjects in the Outside Magazine article "Blood in the Water" on the difficulties and internal competition involved in trying to make a national team boat.
After a two-year pause because of a shoulder injury caused by a mountaineering accident, in 2003 Wetzel returned to the international rowing scene and he joined Team Canada. Wetzel made the coxless four (4-) and he won a gold medal at the 2003 world championships in Milan, Italy. At the 2004 Summer Olympics, Wetzel's boat finished second by inches to Great Britain.
In 2005/2006 Wetzel completed an MSc in Financial Economics at the University of Oxford (Linacre College/Saïd Business School). He was a member of the victorious Oxford crew in the 2006 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race.
He also won at the World Championships 2007 in Canada's M8+.
He won the gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics in the men's eights with Andrew Byrnes, Kyle Hamilton, Malcolm Howard, Adam Kreek, Kevin Light, Ben Rutledge, Dominic Sieterle and cox Brian Price.
Wetzel announced his retirement from international rowing at the Beijing Olympics; Wetzel enrolled in the PhD programme in Finance at the University of British Columbia in autumn 2008.
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