THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT “Anyway, we got to go to Mexico.”5619 Whenever Dudley Storey talks about rowing, his eyes flash and the words come tumbling out in his Kiwi accent with a smile that fills the room. He was never tall, but when I met him in 2010 there was a raw physicality to his frame and enormous vitality in the way he moved. Xochimilco Storey: “We sort of decided what to do about racing at altitude when we got there. We’d heard all these stories, and we were watching the reactions of other people, the Germans, Americans, Brits and the Aussies, anybody, and they were all talking about this ‘even splits down the race course’ stuff. For argument’s sake, if you thought the race was going to be done in 6 minutes, you did 1:30, 1:30, 1:30, 1:30. That gives you 6 minutes. “Well, we sort of thought, ‘Stuff that! “If that’s the way everybody else is going to race, we are going to have to find another strategy. We’ve got to find some other way.’ “I remember riding in the bus coming back from the course one day, sharing a seat with this American. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me from a bar of soap, but he says to me, rather brashly I thought at the time, ‘My name’s Bill Purdy,’ I believe is what he said, ‘and I’m here to win m’self a Gold Medal.’ “And so he told me his whole life story. Americans being Americans, it’s what you do! “One of the questions I asked him was, ‘How long have you been rowing?’ and he said, ‘Four years.’ “All I said in return was, ‘Four years? Hmm,’ because I wasn’t giving any 5619 Storey, personal conversation, 2010 information back at all. Not that I was being coy, but I wasn’t asked for any so I didn’t offer any. “But I’d been around fourteen years by that time. “At the end of it, I asked him what event he was in. “‘Oh, I’m in the four-with.’ And I thought, ‘Well there ain’t no way this prick’s beating me, not with that load of stuff!’ “But, you know it was honest, and it was self-belief on his part . . . and he was a big guy as well. “I relayed the story to our guys, about this bloke goin’ on about how good they were. “After that, they never had a chance.5620 The Kiwi Blitz Storey: “Coming back to our race strategy, we started practising going out between 600 and 700 metres and then burying the boat and trying to break away from the other boats. “And we did it in the heat. I think we actually took 8 seconds out of the field, including the Americans, inside 25 strokes. 1 NZL 2 ROM 3 USA 4 CUB 7:12.19 7:16.56 7:21.39 7:41.11 “We thought to ourselves, ‘This works!’ “The problem was when we got to the end, we were so shagged we couldn’t get out of the boat . . . but nobody knew that [big laugh] because the other little strategy that we had was that regardless of what happens, when we hear the bell go at the end, we’ve just got to keep on rowing to the dock. 5620 For the American perspective on the racing, see Chapter 95. 1547
