INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL Mackenzie again moved over to force Ivanov to row in his wake, all the while jeering him in his thick Aussie accent. Years later, when he had come to America to coach Columbia University, Mackenzie would retell over and over the story of the 1958 Diamond Sculls with evident glee and satisfaction. Stuart Mackenzie also won the European Championship for the second consecutive year in 1958, and he won the Diamonds again in 1959, 1960, 1961 and 1962, six in a row, a feat never equaled before or since, and throughout it all, he kept his puckish, even boorish, sense of humor. “He once drew disfavor in the Henley Royal when, miles ahead of the runner-up, he turned his [shell] around and went over the finish line backwards.”3762 According to Time Magazine of July 11, 1960: “The Thames was full of practicing oarsmen last week, all correctly garbed in soggy sweat suits and all wearing the sober face of dedication to a gentleman’s sport. “Then an Australian named Stuart Mackenzie clapped a flippantly incorrect bowler on his head, put on a sardonic grin, and sallied out for a trial scull. “Watching Mackenzie’s FISA 1956 Film “Windmill” catch, 1956 Note the over-squaring. (Frame 7) parody of his prospective rivals, one old Cambridge rowing blue sniffed: ‘Just not the sort of thing done around here.’ “Yet, that is just the sort of thing Mackenzie has been doing around there for years. “And rather successfully, too, by almost anybody’s reckoning.”3763 Mackenzie withdrew from the 1960 Olympics, his excuse being illness.3764 His last international appearance was at the first World Championships in Lucerne in 1962. As he had at the beginning his career, he came in second to Vyacheslav Ivanov. Vyacheslav Ivanov Just the slightest notch above Stuart Mackenzie, the greatest sculler of the mid-20th Century had to have been his Soviet Ivanov (1938 – ) In those days, there was not yet a World Championship Regatta in rowing, so the biggest non-Olympic regatta in the world each year was the European Championships. Ivanov rival, Vyacheslav international career at the age of 18 by had begun his beating Olympic Champion Yuri Tyukalov in the Soviet Trials and then winning the European title in 1956. A few months later, he won the Olympic Gold Medal (and the Philadelphia Challenge Cup) in Melbourne, sprinting past a demoralized Stuart Mackenzie in the last few meters. 3762 Sone, p. 6 3763 Sport: Gamesmanship Afloat, Time Magazine, July 11, 1960 3764 See Chapter 83. 1031
