THE SUNSET OF CONIBEAR out a little farther. They knew how to do an underarm extension of the armpit and the lats, but other than that, it was the Ratzeburg Style.”4274 Indeed, the Bullen showed +35° of forward body angle as compared to +25° for most Ratzeburger crews. The pullthrough also had more of a vertical component, with all four men lifting their chins noticeably at mid-drive as their backs swung over. As can be seen in the photo at the beginning of this chapter, coming off the line the Bulls would grimace dramatically, and they became a natural favorite with sports photographers. Their histrionics also misled their contemporaries. British international Chris Baillieu:4275 “I remember watching the Bulls of Constance. The German way was just to go out and bang the catch, and after you got the right angle, time wasted! Get it out, and on you go!”4276 I recall having a similar opinion in my own youth, but I have since discovered that careful study of their films tells an entirely different story. Down the course, the effort-level by these very, very large athletes was impressive, suggesting an extremely heavy load, but the effort from entry to release was Classical Technique Schubschlag, witness Hans-Johan Färber’s measured leg motion and the obvious effort toward the finish (previous page, Frame 6). Toward the end of the pullthrough, their back swing ended with the handle still about four inches from the chest, prompting a ferryman’s finish. Despite their chin lifts, they were an elegant, disciplined crew with good posture and excellent homogeneity. They deserved 4274 Nash, op. cit. 4275 See Chapter 130. 4276 Baillieu, personal conversation, 2008 their nickname not because they were clumsy but because they were enormously big and strong. Munich 1972 One cannot exaggerate the enormous symbolic importance of the 1972 Olympics to the divided German people on the two sides of the Iron Curtain. For the West Germans, it was the first Olympics to be held in their country since the partition of Germany at the end of World War II, indeed the first since the infamous 1936 Hitler Olympics. Anti-German feeling still ran very high amongst the living generation of Western Europeans who had suffered through Nazi occupation, and the Munich Olympics were embraced as an opportunity to put a new face on their country. No expense was spared. Nevertheless, echoes of the Second World War still abounded. The new Olympic stadium and village were built on a mound of rubble left over from the conflict, and the beautiful new artificial rowing course at Feldmoching-Oberschleißheim was less than three miles or five kilometers from the museum on the site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. By 1972, the German Democratic Republic had been a separate country for a quarter century, and its people had been physically and psychologically cut off from the West for more than a decade by their heavily fortified borders and the Berlin Wall. From behind the Iron Curtain, their government craved respect on the world stage. As detailed in Chapter 119, international sport was considered by GDR a crucial political tool to gain that respect and was funded at levels comparable to defense spending in the West. Munich would be GDR’s second appearance as a separate country in the Olympics, with separate uniforms, flag and anthem, but it was the first on West German 1173
