THE SPORT OF ROWING “Losing Phil during our Olympic heat at Toda Bashi was a tragedy. We had never been beaten. We were ahead by a comfortable margin. Then . . . we watched the other boats go by. “Later, we regrouped as a sad threesome. By then, we knew that Phil was going to be all right, and we knew that we had another crack at the Olympics through the repêchage . . . We dedicated it to Phil.”3680 Durbrow: “In one of our last workouts in Los Angeles before leaving for Tokyo, we did some extremely fast starts and some very high-rate pieces, and I remember thinking, ‘This boat is flying!’ We were totally in sync. “I feel bad that my guys had to row the Olympic final with a substitute at the last minute. They deserved better.”3681 The Harvard Substitute There were already cultural thunder- clouds on the horizon for the United States in 1964. President Kennedy had been shot a year earlier, the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan, and the Vietnam War had begun in earnest. The seeds of generational conflict had been well sown. In many ways, the U.S. Olympic Rowing Team in Tokyo was a caricature of the country as a whole. On the one hand were the Lake Washington guys, older, short hair, mostly state college types, three of them active-duty military. On the other hand were the Harvard guys, still undergraduates at the world’s elite university, hair already getting just a bit longer, preppy elites, patrician royalty destined to rule the world soon enough, and well aware of their privileged status. Chris Kirkland, Geoff Picard’s Harvard roommate and manager of the 1964 3680 Mittet, op. cit. 3681 Durbrow, op. cit. Harvard Crew: “I don’t know about ruling the world. Maybe they were more ready to serve and care for the world: four doctors, an eco-green lawyer, two bankers, a teacher and a writer/gardener/gentleman sculler. They were, to a man, well aware of their privileged status and of their responsibilities.”3682 Ted Washburn: “As the press correctly put it with regard to the Harvard rowers and the Vesper and Lake Washington oarsmen, the college guys were ‘boys’ and the club rowers were ‘men.’ There was a really wide generation gap there, although we Harvard types scoffed at the suggestion.”3683 The top American collegiate crew had won every U.S. Olympic Eights Trials since 1920, so it is understandable that Harvard had arrived at the Olympic Eights Trials considering themselves the presumptive heirs, undefeated and expecting to be anointed. And they were very good. Even when they were upset by Vesper Boat Club,3684 seven of the nine Varsity members made the Olympic Team anyway. Their coach, Harry Parker,3685 split his eight into a coxed- and a coxless-four. The coxed-four won its Trials.3686 The coxless- four finished second in its own Trials, just 2.9 seconds behind Ted’s Lake Washington crew. Geoff Picard and Bobby Schwarz were then picked for the Olympic Team as port and starboard sweep spares. In the middle of the U.S. Olympic Team’s cultural divide was the Vesper Eight, a combination of club rowers and Ivy grads, undergraduates and military officers 3682 Kirkland, personal correspondence, 2009 3683 Washburn, personal correspondence, 2009 3684 See Chapter 100. 3685 See Chapter 101. 3686 Ibid. 1008
