INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL Greatness The next three years would be Long Beach Rowing Association’s first great era. By 1970, John Van Blom, John Nunn and Tom McKibbon would all become Olympians and haul in Olympic Bronze, World Championship Bronze, Pan Am Bronze, the Double Sculls Challenge Cup at Henley and finally European Championship Gold. Why Long Beach? The weather in Long Beach is as good as it gets in the continental United States. The Marine Stadium and boathouse facilities are first rate. Rowable water is available perhaps 360 days a year, and even into the 21st Century, recreational boat traffic, the bane of many traditional rowing venues, is manageable. Does that adequately explain the success of Long Beach Rowing Association during the late 1960s and then a second burst of success in the 1970s with McKibbon and/or Van Blom as coach? Nunn: “It started with the ‘32 Olympics. That’s what got rowing here. The program continued with German boats, Italian boats, Japanese boats that were left here after the Games.”3914 Van Blom: “I think it was a freaky coincidence, mostly. I don’t think there was any one thing that decided it. You had some people who had the desire to excel and worked at it and did it. “You had a couple of people who were determined to win.”3915 McKibbon: “I don’t think it was any one particular thing. I think it was just a collection of good people who were willing to spend everything on their goal. 3914 Nunn, personal conversation, 2008 3915 John Van Blom, op. cit. “The tradition was there from 1932, and the facilities were great, especially after ‘68 when the city refurbished the Marine Stadium to host the Olympic Trials.”3916 Indeed, the 1968 Olympic Trials on Alamitos Bay were a very big deal for the City of Long Beach. With their oil revenues, the city had modernized the course, built a new boathouse and purchased a fleet of identical Pocock shells, six each of doubles, coxed- and coxless-pairs and coxed- and coxless-fours, so that every Olympic Trials entrant could have access to a brand-new identical top-of-the-line shell from the boat pool at the course. After the regatta, this boat pool was maintained by Pete Archer, and for decades it remained a key asset available to the club and the college. McKibbon: “As to how it happened in Long Beach, I think there’s not enough credit given to the basic groundwork, a giant pyramid built on a faith. At Long Beach it was spiritual. There was something in the air. “The boathouse was just a sacred place for me and for many of us. There was this old guy, Al Sievert. I called him ‘the Major.’ He had been a fighter pilot in the First World War. He knew Corrigan and Rickenbacker, but he was just this wonderful guy, and he never called me by my correct name. He called me McGibbons. “He used to come down every afternoon to the boathouse with his little brown bag with a can of ale. He knew the whole history of military aviation. He said they used to fly over the mountains and there’d be the Germans down there, and they’d get a brick and throw the brick out of the plane at them, and then they took hand guns up there, and then they mounted machine guns to the plane and shot their propellers off. 3916 McKibbon, op. cit. 1079
