THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT The programme, for example, would begin with 10k, then 12k and then 14k, gradually building up through the winter. By the end of the winter, they would be rowing 20k pretty hard. “And then the [athletes who have been training at U.S. colleges] come up to Victoria and join in, and they’re used to a college program. Immediately it’s ‘This is ridiculous!’ ‘This is absurd!’ ‘There’s no way we can do this!’ wicked ‘This is a program!’ ‘Spracklen is a killer!’ ‘He flogs us to death!’ “That’s where it comes from. “So I say to the guys, ‘Okay, let’s cut the program then.’ And of course the guys who have done it through the winter don’t want to cut it. You ask any of my guys who have trained with me if they want the program reduced, and there’s no way they’d agree. And in fact you get to the point where they’re worried that we’re not training hard enough.”6203 Baillieu: “You’ve got to find the right persona to have around a crew, and I think Mike was good at that. He understood. With us, he was very low key, and I needed that. I don’t do well with an excitable coach. It’s not my scene at all. Mike Hart had a higher threshold of excitable coaches. He could manage that because he’s very laid back himself, but I think we both found we had a very strong relationship with Mike, and I think it gave us considerable strength when we went into events and so on.”6204 6203 Moag, op. cit., p. 44 6204 Baillieu, op. cit. Furnivall Rowing Club Coach Andy Holmes at Furnivall Redgrave: “Mike is very much a technical coach. Mike is self-taught, completely self-taught, so you’ve got to admire him for that. “He lives, breathes and sleeps the sport, and he’s always trying to move things on technically. “I would class Mike as a rowing coach and a rowing thinker. You give him a problem, even if you give him a problem that’s very tongue-in-cheek, and you know that what you’re saying is wrong, but there’s no obvious answer, Mike would go away. He would have sleepless nights over it, and then three weeks later, four weeks later, he would come back and say, ‘Ah, that East German quad does it that way because of this, this and this.’ “‘What? What’s he talking about?’ “‘That question you asked me . . . whenever?’ 1729
