THE SPORT OF ROWING “‘It seemed like crap, what we were doing. We were tired, and it was beginning to show.’”5071 Rosenberg: “Adam did no distance work, and von Groddeck realized that multiple sprints were not cutting it. When he confronted Adam, they nearly came to blows . . . until von Groddeck remembered Adam’s boxing skills.5072”5073 Olympic Letdown Something else very significant may have been going on here. The Ratzeburg crew was history’s first true long-term Olympic effort in the eights. Karl Adam had begun building his program in the mid- ’50s, won the 1960 Olympic title and continued on to 1964. We now know that his program would continue to target the Olympic Eight race every four years through Mexico City in 1968 and Munich in 1972. In the past, a college or a club might have a good group in an Olympic year, win its country’s trials, row and then the crew would retire. Occasionally, a winning eight would attempt to reconstitute four years later, such as the 1920 Annapolis crew in 1924 and the 1952 Annapolis crew in 1956, but they never succeeded in qualifying for a second Olympics. As one progresses through a four-year quadrennial, the Olympic final looms larger and larger. The pressure increases. In 1964, of the two superb crews who had battled to a near-dead heat in Amsterdam, the Russians were never a factor in the Tokyo final, and the Germans couldn’t match the Americans after beating them in the opening heat. As they poured on more work, more training, more effort into each pullthrough to prepare for the Olympics, the one goal they had worked for during four, long years, they 5071 Stowe, pp. 126-7 5072 See Chapter 92. 5073 Rosenberg, op. cit. seemed to reach a tipping point and lost their edge. This is the first example of an Olympic letdown, but it will by no means be the last. It will happen again to Karl Adam and Ratzeburg in 1972,5074 and it will become an incredibly frustrating and painful recurring pattern for American and foreign national team programs over the following forty long years. But none of this was obvious as the 1964 Vesper Eight approached the car headlights shining across the course at the end of Toda Bashi. Budd: “We went across the finish line, in the dark, and I remember thinking, ‘I wish I could be one of those athletes who goes across the line and puts up his arms up and says, ‘I won!’ but the only thing I wanted was for this pain to stop.’ “It always seemed to me that the pain welled after you stopped. You get this wave of lactic acid all over your body. “But then two things begin to happen. The pain begins to subside, and then the realization begins. First some guy from behind you reaches forward and whacks you on the head, and then you reach forward and you hit the guy in front of you, and bit by bit, you realize you’ve won the race. “Once we had our medals around our necks, they then do the national anthem, and that was a very emotional thing. “There were a whole lot of big, tough, nasty-ass Vesper oarsmen with tears streaming down their faces because it was such the impossible dream.”5075 Emory Clark: “My first thought after the race was about the Amlongs. I thought, ‘I’ll never have to see those bastards ever again!’”5076 5074 See Chapter 100. 5075 Budd, qtd. in A Fine Balance 5076 Clark, personal conversation, 2005. “This quote about the Amlongs after the final is close 1402