THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT was a father figure to him, but I had been to a couple of World Champs and a couple of Olympics. “He was doing a lot of learning, but he didn’t contribute a heck of a lot at all to the conversation. Most of the stuff came between Noel Mills and Ross and m’self. “He was technically very good, and you can see that now. He applies the same techniques today as to what we were trying to row then. That’s why his crews are so fast. They don’t just go fast for no reason, y’know.”5649 The Semi-Final Tonks: “Dudley Storey did most of the coaching from the 3-seat in the four, calling, keeping it all, yelling it out. He was on his game. He had the confidence that he knew what was going on in the boat, so if you were having a good row or flying or something, he knew.”5650 Storey: “The only washout about that whole story of ‘72, I suppose, would be that I didn’t recognize that we were as good as we actually were. I didn’t think we were that fast, and I didn’t even recognize it after we’d won our semi-final. I don’t know what I thought . . . because I was sort of the Big Kahuna. I was, ‘This is what we’re going to do, and this is how we’re going to do it.’ “I can remember Ross Collinge, for example, saying at about 1,000 metres in that semi-final, because we were just cruisin’, but we were fifth as well, and you’ve got to be first three. We were in touch, but we were still fifth. And Ross said, ‘If we don’t get our ass into gear, we’re not gonna make the final!’ “Well, we just up and [makes the sound and gesture of a jet plane taking off]. We did the second 1,000 three seconds faster than the first, and that was pretty much 5649 Ibid. 5650 Tonks, personal conversation, 2010 unheard of in those days, especially since we were considered inexperienced.”5651 Tonks: “I had changed my oar. My regular oar had a little crack in it, which I discovered that day, so we changed it. “I went out and in the first 1,000 metres, y’know, I was just out of time. Couldn’t get the feel of it ‘cause I had this stiffer blyde . . . but it clicked at the 1,000 metre mark, and we just started motoring. We mowed through East Germany, and of course they took the weight off while we charged on. “The semi-final was the day before the final in those days, so maybe they saved a little something. We rowed well in the final, but p’rhaps if we had taken the weight off and just saved that little bit in the semi . . . Well, you never know.”5652 The Final The coxless-fours final turned out to be one of the most memorable races of the Munich Olympics. www.rowinghistory-aus.info: “The East German crew5653 had been together for eleven years and were unbeaten for six years in this class of boat, and they were the current Olympic Champions. They were masters of their sport. The New Zealanders had no respect for such a record and put up a demanding fight in what became the great race of the regatta.”5654 Storey: “All the way down the course, we overlapped an East German crew that had not lost at the Worlds since 1966. They were World Champions in ‘66. Sixty-seven they weren’t there because they got beaten by another DDR crew. Sixty-eight Olympic Champs, ‘69, ‘70, ‘71 and then ‘72! And 5651 Storey, op. cit. 5652 Tonks, op. cit. 5653 SC Einheit Dresden. See newsreel frames in Chapter 119. 5654 www.rowinghistory-aus.info 1555
