THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT allowance to athletes who belong to the top eight in their event, based upon results in the year before.”6869 So Marit van Eupen could carry on after Schinias. 2008 Olympic Quadrennial Van Eupen: “After Athens, Kirsten and I went separate ways. Kirsten had a baby girl, I focused on the single.”6870 The result was three consecutive World titles for Marit. de perfecte haal: “In 2005, she won the Women’s Lightweight World Champion- ship, the first Dutch lady to do so. She is passionate about rowing, maybe because she only got her start in her 30s, and after hundreds of thousands of strokes during endless training sessions, she was able to reach the top.”6871 Accelerate, send, glide . . . accelerate, send, glide . . . Co Rentmeester includes film of van Eupen training on the Amstel River in his documentary, de perfecte haal. Just watching her row a few strokes at steady state teaches you all you ever have to know about boat moving. It is poetry. Racing her single, Marit tends to shoot for even splits. She is often left in the first 500, only to pick off her opponents one by one in the second 500 and pull away in the third. In 2007, she was tested by British/American Jennifer Goldsack, who beat her in their semi-final and led her in the final into the third 500. But Goldsack’s early pace got the best of her as van Eupen motored through to win convincingly. She 6869 www.worldrowing.com, op. cit. 6870 Ibid. 6871 Rentmeester, de perfecte haal. seemed to glide further between each stroke as she cruised down the course. Back to the Double As there is only a doubles race in the Olympics for lightweight women, as soon as the 2007 World Championships were completed, it was time for single sculler van Eupen to cast around again for a double- partner. She approached her colleague of 2000 to 2004, Kirsten van der Kolk. Van Eupen: “The story is slightly different. Kirsten decided that she wanted to make a comeback, and after the 2007 World Championships she thought a Gold Medal would be possible. She asked me, and I had to think about her proposal for more than a while.”6872 “When we sat together last autumn [2007] to see if we wanted to make a comeback in the doubles, the first question was: ‘Why do we want to do this?’”6873 Coach Josy Verdonkschot: “We asked ourselves: are we prepared to do it? Will we enjoy it? Does the National Olympic Committee believe in us? All the answers to those questions were ‘Yes!’”6874 Van Eupen: “To say that we both have a certain competitive instinct would be an understatement. We saw the opportunity, but we knew that there are no guarantees. So we had to be sure that we both wanted to do this because of the challenge and the fun in the process, not because of a must-have result or out of frustration. “We decided to go for it. We tried to give it all and have the perfect preparation. We couldn’t have done it without the experience from all the years before, but 6872 Van Eupen, op. cit. 6873 Déborah Feutren, Orange fireworks in the making, World Rowing Magazine, August 2008, p. 10 6874 Feutren, op. cit. 1911
