THE SPORT OF ROWING and GDR surrendered a whopping 3.54 seconds to Baillieu and Hart in the last 500, their slowest of the race. Even the winners from Norway, who had put distance on the British in each of the first two 500s, lost a second to them in the third 500 and another half a second toward the end. Baillieu: “We always found it intriguing that the East German way of sculling was technically extremely proficient, but they were geared so severely, very narrow spread, that we knew that if under pressure they needed to find four or even two extra beats per minute, they couldn’t do it. They were right on the limit.6106 “So far as we ever had a stroke of inspiration, it was when we realized that these guys could be cracked providing you could stay with them,6107 and we realized it here [at Henley] back in 1973. What you had to do was row your race in such a way that you put yourself in an attacking position at the end. “Now what we couldn’t do, because we didn’t have the physical strength, was to lead them. People would ask us if we couldn’t go faster in the first 500. We’d said, ‘No, we’d be dead,’ which we would have been because we would have been up to here [gestures to his neck] in lactate, and we would have been no good at all. “We were relatively small, even by the standards of those days, so we had to be smart, and I’d like to think we were one step ahead of most of the rest in the game, but not all. “We know that even if the East Germans hadn’t been on drugs, they would have won because their training methods were better than ours. They’d sussed out that rowing was endurance sport, not some form of 400 meter sprint where you spent your whole 6106 See Chapters 121 and 123. 6107 The Hansen brothers from Norway came to the same conclusion. See Chapter 121. time doing countless 500s and God knows what else. “You have to remember that in those days it wasn’t just three sessions endurance training, but there was a lot of anaerobic training as well. We were actually doing both quantity and quality . . . or trying to. “Right to the end of my career, we were doing what would now be regarded as a completely mad program because it had such a high anaerobic component.”6108 1977 World Championships Spracklen: “The double sculls event in the Montréal Olympics had been won by Alf and Frank Hansen from Norway. The following year the Hansen brothers did not compete, leaving the World Championship title open for Chris and Mike.”6109 Baillieu: “I remember chatting with Jim Clark,6110 who was in the British Pair and won a Silver Medal in ‘77. He’d been in the tent that year when Mike Spracklen was giving us the warm-up talk before we went out, and Jim said, ‘If I’d been in your crew I’d have been in tears. I was just listening, and I was almost in tears it was so negative! “‘Watch out for this! This might go wrong! Watch out for that!’ “It wasn’t about accentuating the positive. It was all about what might go wrong. Jim said his face was getting longer and longer. ‘God, I’m glad I’m not in that race!’ “But we were used to Mike, so it wasn’t a problem, and I think we covered all the options.”6111 Spracklen: “My routine before a race is to assess the conditions just before a crew goes afloat and give my views and observations of what to look and prepare for 6108 Baillieu, op. cit. 6109 Spracklen, op. cit. 6110 See Chapter 117. 6111 Baillieu, op. cit. 1708
