THE LONG ECLIPSE OF AMERICAN ROWING other stroke for the second piece, and then I switched back with the bow-man for the third, and then I switched across with the other bow for the fourth. My boat had won all four pieces, and so I had convincingly beaten each one of the other three port oarsmen in the two boats. “We were all expecting one more piece, but Harry announced, ‘That’s it. Bring the boats in.’ “Vespoli was riding in the launch, and he later told me he said to Harry, ‘You’re taking Calvin, right?’ “Harry said, ‘Oh no. I’m taking [Dave Sawyer].’ “Mike asked, ‘How do you figure that? Cal won all these pieces.’ Harry explained that he was relying on races and combinations from several days earlier. So- and-so had beaten so-and-so by so much and that meant that somebody else was faster than . . . something like that.4763 “So that’s how I got cut. I was pissed! “Before I left, Harry came up to me and said, ‘You know, you’re a good stroke, and had the crew had more time with you in the boat, had you come to this Camp directly instead of going to Henley, you might have ended up stroking that eight.’ “That’s all I needed to hear. something to him that probably included curse words and asked for my bus ticket back to Boston.”4764 After Selection After the bruising camp in Hanover, New Hampshire, involving seemingly endless seat racing and ergometer testing, the selected crew’s first competition was the Internationale Meisterschaften des 4763 The Transitive Law of Seat Racing, if you remember your arithmetic. 4764 Coffey, personal conversation, 2007 Deutschen Ruderverbandes4765 on the same Feldmoching-Oberschleißheim course that would later that summer host the Olympic competitions. The race favorite was “Dr. Adam’s Wunder-Achter” from Ratzeburg. The U.S. Eight beat them in the heat and beat them again in the final, with New Zealand, “only five days off the plane,”4766 an encouraging fourth. The Kiwis won the next regatta in Hannover, grabbing the lead with a stunningly fast first 500 and then holding off a charge by the Americans toward the finish. 1972 Olympics In their preliminary heat with three to qualify for the semis, the U.S. drew, among others, Ratzeburg, which had skipped the Hannover regatta. They were rowing their secret weapon, a revolutionary shell built of space age composite materials just for them by Empacher Bootswerft in Eberbach, West Germany and designed to last only through the end of the regatta. It was dubbed “Der Schwarze Aal,” the Black Eel. Peter Lippett, The Oarsman: “A great I said start immediately propelled us into first place. At the first marker, our lead was 2.46 seconds. . . . [Later in the race] the Germans continued to cut into the lead until, with about 200 meters to go they realized they could not win. Our margin of 4.27 seconds at the finish was about what it had been a month earlier on the same water.”4767 After the repêchages, in one semi-final, West Germany, New Zealand and Poland qualified in that order. In the other, GDR, Russia and the U.S. also qualified easily, 4765 International Championship of the German Rowing Clubs 4766 Lippett, p. 8 4767 Lippett, p. 24 1323
