THE SPORT OF ROWING “Finally we lined up. I don’t know how this happened, but our coach, Ken Blue, got the commands totally wrong. It was French back then, but he said, “Are you ready? . . . No, we’re going to do this over again. . . . Areyoureadyrow!’ “Just like that. “It was stupid, but we blew them out of the water. We just beat them up. We were doing something like a twenty- or thirty- stroke start, and then Ted hit a buoy. They had installed these terrible big Styrofoam buoys for the Trials. They were topped by a three-quarter inch dowel with an orange flag, and you couldn’t row through them. Ted broke his blade. “It crossed my mind that Ted Nash was not a guy you wanted to get riled up.”3891 The Detroit Four won their heat but placed only a close fourth in the final behind Ted’s Lake Washington boat, Harvard and Vesper. McKibbon: “In ‘64 without knowing it, Ted Nash did a lot of things to help my career. After they beat us in the final, I went into the locker room, and he was getting fitted for his Olympic outfit, and he wanted this taken in and that tucked in, and I was looking at him thinking, ‘Son of a bitch, that’s my track suit!’ “I determined right there that I would be on the next Olympic Team.”3892 In the 3-seat of McKibbon’s Detroit Four was future LBRA member Bill Maher. Besides Maher, there was another future Long Beach teammate at the ‘64 Trails. In 1962, John Nunn had rowed on the IRA Champion Cornell crew. At the 1964 Trials, he was a member of a group of undergraduates and recent graduates put together in composite boats in Laconia, New Hampshire by Wisconsin coach Norm 3891 McKibbon, op. cit. 3892 Ibid. Sonju and MIT coach Jack Frailey. It was the first unofficial National Selection Camp. Nunn’s eight did not make it beyond the repêchages at the Trials, but later he moved to Southern California and joined LBRA. And then there was Van Blom and Krahenbuhl in a coxless-pair. Krahenbuhl: “In Long Beach we could race only against the fours and the eights, so we had no idea how fast a pair we might be. “We went to New York Athletic Club, the site of the Olympic Trials, a month early, and one day we took a time trial just to see ballpark how we were doing on that course. As I remember, we did about a 7:16, and back at the boathouse we were talking to some of the guys, and they asked what we did that day, and we told them the time. “They said, ‘Are you sure?’ “‘Certainly within a second or two.’ “‘Well, the course record here is 7:25!’ “I thought to myself, ‘Damn, maybe we are for real.’ “In our first heat, the Lake Washington A boat was Bob Brayton and Dan Watts, and they had been Silver Medalists at the 1963 Pan Am Games. The Yale boat had Charlie Grimes and Don Beer from their 1956 Olympic Gold Medal Eight. “We won the race . . . by a significant amount!”3893 “We had a very bad start and were last to the 500. At the 1,000 we were leading everyone. By the 1,300 we had open water on Lake Washington, and the rest of the field was strung out about six or eight lengths back. We held the lead at about one and a half lengths across the finish line. Our winning time was 7:17.”3894 3893 Krahenbuhl, op. cit. 3894 Krahenbuhl & Richard Lee, A Review of How I Came to Row in the 1964 Olympic Rowing Trials, unpublished manuscript, 1964 1074
