THE SPORT OF ROWING The Heat “Race day, Sunday August 27, was perfect, just a breeze down the course from the starting line, and we had a good lane to see the other crews. With us were Poland, Uruguay, and the Netherlands. “Heats are not finals, and people play games in them, going all out for a short period, bagging it the whole way, and such. One thing for sure, if we won, we would go to the semi-finals and would be able to skip the repêchages. That would give us three days between races. “We took off. We had a good start and went quickly into our racing cadence. We maintained third position for most of the race, and at 700 to go rowed through Poland and the Dutch and finished the race in first with a time of 7:50.0, beating Poland by three lengths. “All in all, we felt pretty good about the race. We didn’t have to push ourselves and easily moved through the other crews. We were deemed to be strong Gold Medal prospects by the Associated Press. “Since we had three days between events, we planned to do a full workout on Monday, watch the repêchage races on Tuesday and have an easy row over the course on Wednesday before our semi-final on Thursday. “As I said, the race course was oriented to take advantage of the normal winds for August and September. Unfortunately, the wind turned around from a mild tailwind into an almost gale force headwind the day after the heat. Horrible news for us. “Monday morning we had whitecaps blowing up the course. Ted gave us our workout. We were to get used to the wind by rowing 3 x 2,000 meters at three-quarter power. “After one piece, my arms felt like overdone spaghetti. After two, our shoulders ached, and we just barely made it through. Mike and I decided that we were done and told Ted that we were tired and would not do any more hard work until our semi-final. “That didn’t go over very well. We continued to bicker with Ted about the boat, the oars and everything else. I really didn’t want to be managed in this manner any more.”5975 Analysis That the crew felt fine and was competitive in a tailwind but had trouble recovering between workouts and was sluggish and uncompetitive in a headwind strongly suggests overloading, both in training regime and in rigging leverage. Cal Coffey: “I was also in the ‘72 Pairs Trials, came in third or fourth as I recall. I was working for Ted Van Dusen5976 making boats at the time, and that was when I first got into rigging. I would add three to four inches to standard oar handles and move the collars. Then I would bolt a plate onto the Pocock rigger that allowed me to bolt the pins a couple of inches further out from the center of the boat. This would get me the change in load in a Pocock pair, almost universal in the United States, to what I was looking for. “Load is very complicated. You have to take into consideration the composition of the crew, the style they are rowing and the conditions, so I can’t be sure that Luther and Mike were loaded too heavily in 1972.”5977 The Semi-Final Jones: “Our semi-final was not good. We were still aching from our Monday work out, and with our pizza paddle oars pushing 5975 Jones, op. cit. 5976 See Chapter 140. 5977 Coffey, op. cit. 1678
