THE WINDS OF CHANGE “Sunday morning, more wind and the two-hour notice remained in effect. I think it was about 3 PM when we were told to get ready to row at 5. “Mentally, I think we had gone past our peak and sort of just wanted to get on with it. We never really settled in the first 1,000 meters and had just a little too much to get back at the end.” 2603 Yale: “After five weeks at Gales Ferry preparing for the Boat Race against Harvard and for the Trials afterwards, Jim thought we needed a change of environment, so when we left Gales Ferry we went directly to the Hotel Syracuse. We had clean rooms and sheets, decent food, and a more relaxed and private existence. “Yes, and the night before the final we did go to a movie. For the locals it was quite a sight with our coxswain, Bill Becklean, strutting out in front of these big guys and barking orders as to what movie we should see. “The hotel stay, compliments of the Yale Crew Association, was another one of Jim Rathschmidt’s ‘head games,’ proof that Yale was ‘different.’”2604 Cornell: “Our Olympic Trials final race was much like Yale’s first heat in Melbourne,2605 just a bad day. “Yale’s great crew reconciled their bad day two days afterward, and Cornell reconciled ours throughout our 1957 undefeated season.2606”2607 Stan Pocock, at the Trials coaching small-boat entrants,2608 viewed the race from a boatbuilder’s perspective. “As the eights came down the windblown course, 2603 Gravink, op. cit. 2604 Cooke, op. cit. 2605 See Chapter 69. 2606 See Chapter 70. 2607 Gravink, op. cit. 2608 See Chapter 83. 2609 another exaggeration. Yale also beat them in the 1956 Carnegie Cup. 2610 S. Pocock, p. 226 2611 According to von Wrangell, Cointe was a veteran of the French Foreign Legion and a good friend of Stork Sanford’s. He was nicknamed “Uncle George” in 1947 when he first came to the Cornell boathouse to take care of blisters and sore muscles. something looked wrong. Inexplicably, Cornell’s blades were only scratching the tops of the waves. A story circulated afterward that Cornell’s riggers had been raised an inch just before the race. If true, whoever did it must have thought that the crew would be better able to handle the rough water rigged that way. It would have been better had they left the riggers alone. This was the only race2609 that the Cornell crew lost in four years of intercollegiate competition.”2610 Yale: “The ‘Washington Mafia’ had been so convinced that Cornell, with Washingtonian Stork Sanford as coach, was going to win the Trials that they had already hired as Olympic trainer Georges Cointe (the Cornell fencing coach2611), and Washington-grad Tom Bolles from Harvard as team manager. “The rigger was George Pocock himself, another Washingtonian. “After we won, at Jim Rathschmidt’s insistence, Yale manager Roger Bullard was added to the Olympic staff as an assistant. “In summary, Yale outrowed Cornell twice in three meetings in 1956, and only lost once on a fluke, boat-stopping crab in Washington, DC. “As an aside, the 1956 Yale Crew understroked every crew in every race – and still won – that is until we met the Aussies and the Canadians on Lake Wendouree, and reluctantly came to the realization that we 719
