THE SPORT OF ROWING coach from Washington and was then coach and athletic director at Harvard,4511 spectacles, white hair, very, very impressive guy, said, ‘Hold on! There’s no need to go that far. We don’t have to row high. We don’t have to make any changes!’ “And he couldn’t have been more wrong, because the drift of technical, training, equipment and the like was beginning to leave our crews behind in international races. “And so, two years later in 1960, when Navy sent a very, very fine eight to the Olympic Games in Rome, they were badly beaten.4512 “Of course, that caused a bigger ripple in America than my comments ever did.”4513 Historian Chuck von Wrangell: “The shocking loss of the Navy Eight in the 1960 Olympics led to an intense discussion among the coaches at their annual gathering in New York in December of that year. A well-drilled crew of strong young athletes trained by a mathematics teacher in Ratzeburg, a small town in northern Germany, rowing in a shell of new design and oars of a new design, took the Gold. “American college crews had had an unbroken string of victories in the eights since 1920. “The assembled coaches focused on this matter to the virtual exclusion of any other business. I had left the world of coaching crew nine years earlier, but I was intensely interested and asked permission to attend the meeting. “The debate was in full swing when I arrived, and at just about that time there was a clamor for my old coach, Stork Sanford.4514 Everyone wanted to hear his opinion on what should be done. “Sanford stood up, and there was absolute silence. I cannot remember exactly what he said, but I think the gist of it was that we had not yet given the Olympic event our best shot. Paying great respect to the Navy crew which had won the Trials, he pointed out that there really had been no exceptional crew in America that past year to have put the Germans to a full test. He believed we should stick with what had been our best before we changed to something new. “He agreed that during Olympic years coaches should intensify training for the shorter distance, but he felt that coaches should not immediately jump on the 2,000- meter bandwagon just because of the defeat in 1960. “Further, he remained completely loyal to Pocock shells and oars. “There were some stirring and murmurs of dissent after he had spoken. Dutch Schoch [of Princeton], I recall, respectfully disagreed. He argued that we had to get shells and oars like Ratzeburg’s and that we had to train to row the 2,000 meter distance like they did, meaning we had to row at a much higher stroke rate. “He repeatedly pointed out that the difference in times was something like twenty seconds, and that margin was just too big to ignore. The new boat design and the funny-looking oars had to be making a big difference.”4515 4511 See Chapter 63. 4512 See Chapter 90. 4513 Rosenberg, op. cit. 4514 See Chapter 70. 4515 Von Wrangell, personal correspondence, 2005 1248
