THE SPORT OF ROWING to move, and somebody will say, ‘That’s it!’ and that’s all you have to say.”8202 Jeff Klepacki: “Volp’s stroke got really horizontal as opposed to lifting off the catch. The shoulders would get engaged pretty ear- ly. He missed no water at the front. His catch was direct, so almost no splash or a vertical splash, and he was immediately connected and horizontal the whole way through to the finish. “As he matured physically in those later years, his VO² was in the top 1% of elite athletes. He was 7.1 or 7.2 liters, which was nearly unprecedented. There are maybe four people I know of in the world that are at that level, so the fact that he has that capacity, is pulling 5:47 on the erg, and his lactic acid threshold is higher than the rest of the group, you have a very unique specimen who should go home and thank Mom and Dad for the genetic code he’s been given. “When most of us were starting to count down the clock, he was just getting warmed up.”8203 Ted Nash: “Mike and I have had a life- time of debate about boats and styles. Where we always agreed was on reaching into the water sharply but quietly with silent, snug catches, blending, suspending the body weight and continuing the pressure as long as there is water to use. We always agreed on the value of small-boat talent. “The 2004 crew was well mixed by head chef Teti with sauce, pepper, spirit and logic and stirring all the time.”8204 It is interesting to look at the force curves of Volpenhein and Read earlier in this chapter. Their metaphorical journey through the various approaches to technique apparently did not take them all the way to the perfect parabolas of GDR athletes such as Thomas Lange. Both curves show excel- 8202 Volpenhein, op. cit. 8203 Klepacki, op. cit. 8204 Nash, personal correspondence, 2010 lent coordination of legs and back, the be- ginnings of a symmetrical parabola, but their late arm break8205 limited acceleration in the last third of their pullthroughs. Bryan: “Trying to keep accelerating [all the way through to the release] with the in- creasing speed of an eight is really hard, but I think we did that really well in our eight in 2004. That was one of the best things that we did. You’ve got to create momentum and then somehow hold on to it for as long as you can, and for a long time it seems like we forgot that as a National Team . . . and as a country! “Instead, we were all about ‘Get as much power as you can as early as you can!’ and not hold on to it as long as you can.”8206 The Olympic Lineup The final 2004 Olympic boating had the many-faceted Jason Read in the bow-seat. The curve of 2-seat Wyatt Allen in the 2004 Eight was perhaps the closest to the Schubschlag ideal. A product of the club program at the University of Virginia, he went on to win the Diamond Sculls at Hen- ley in 2005. Ahrens: “I wasn’t around, but the leg- end was that when Wyatt showed up in Princeton, people thought he didn’t row well and this and that and that he wasn’t strong enough, so they kind of put him in the back. When everybody went out, he’d get stuck in a single. “Over time, he was doing pieces, and he was not at the back of the pack, and then all of a sudden he was winning, and soon he was the best single sculler of all, and also his erg score was really good.”8207 8205 See Chapter 168. 8206 Volpenhein, op. cit. 8207 Ahrens, personal conversation, 2010 2298
