and winning the THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT ‘69 European Championship.5960 Hough had then teamed with Monk Terry5961 to place seventh at the World Championships in 1970. Jones: “Dick Lyon had rowed to Olympic Bronze with Ted in 19645962 and had rowed against me in the 1968 Coxed- Fours Trials. He was hard as nails.”5963 Kent Mitchell had been the Olympic Bronze Medal coxswain for Conn Findlay and Dick Draeger in Rome in 1960. They then won Olympic Gold in ‘64 with Ed Ferry replacing Draeger.5964 Kent had been the small-boats coach for the 1966 World Championships.5965 Mitchell: “In the fall of 1971, we were training at Stanford for the Olympic Trials and had a good four-with which had Lyon in it but not Hough. “Then the NAAO announced that the National Camp would preempt open trials in that event, and we stopped rowing. There was no interest in disrupting jobs, personal lives, etc. to go East to the Camp. “At that point, Dick contacted Larry and asked if he would be interested in rowing together. They then started training in a pair-without as their focus event in the spring of 1972, and I coached them out here at Stanford. “I was planning on doing the split at both the Nationals in timing5966 Philadelphia and the Trials on Lake Waramaug in Connecticut, so I was going to be in Philadelphia where Larry and Dick planned to race the straight-pair as a warm up for the Trials. Since we were all there anyway, they decided to enter the pair-with 5960 See Chapter 110. 5961 See Chapter 103. 5962 See Chapter 85. 5963 Jones, op. cit. 5964 See Chapter 82. 5965 See Chapter 102. 5966 Mitchell is president of JAMCO™, which provides split timing and real-time audio and video streaming for rowing events. at the Nationals as a one-time affair, never having rowed the boat before, just to get some racing experience together.”5967 Jones: “The ‘72 Nationals were on July 17. We got off to a good start. At one point, we were a full length ahead of the field, but then Stanford began to move. We watched their bow ball moving from our stern past Mike, through me and past Aaron. We were dead even as we passed the head of the island about a quarter mile from the finish line. “They pulled ahead with thirty strokes left, and I could feel it slipping away. I yelled, ‘Mike, let’s go now!’ Up went the stroke. We put in ten and then twenty and finally thirty strokes. “Not only did we catch Stanford, we passed them and crossed the finish line 0.3 seconds or about a half a deck ahead. We had overtaken the clear favorites, and they were really disappointed because the three of them wanted to go to the Olympics. “It was those last thirty strokes that had made the difference. Now, all we had to do was replicate it in the Olympic Trials.”5968 Staines: “They were complaining that they should have won because we had such a light coxswain, but then their coxswain, Kent Mitchell, reminded them that their boat weighed about thirty pounds less than ours. We had a Pocock, and they had a Stämpfli or a Donoratico or something.”5969 Mitchell: “I don’t remember what make of boat we had, but I probably wasn’t even close to 110 pounds (the Olympic weight) because entering the pairs-with at Nationals was only an afterthought, and I was not planning on competing in the Olympic Trials in any case.”5970 5967 Mitchell, personal correspondence, 2007 5968 Jones, unpublished memoir, 2006 5969 Staines, op. cit. 5970 Mitchell, personal correspondence, 2007 1673
