THE SPORT OF ROWING Chris Ahrens Three-seat Chris Ahrens had perhaps the most improbable journey to Athens of anyone in the crew. He had rowed at Mil- waukee Rowing Club and Princeton Univer- sity, the only product of an Ivy League pro- gram in the entire 2004 Eight. When he joined the team in 1997, he was rowing 0-9, 0-9, 5-10 concurrent Schub- schlag. When last we saw him in 2000,8208 he was rowing 0-6, 2-9, 5-10 sequential Kernschlag. By 2004, he was again rowing 0-9, 0-9, 5-10 concurrent Schubschlag with extra emphasis on back swing in the second half of the pullthrough. Ahrens: “I think there’s a balance be- tween productive effort and nonproductive effort, but I think you can read too much into the technical stuff. “I think that confidence is a huge com- ponent of performance. When you’re confi- dent, you can row better because you feel more relaxed and you can apply your power better, and when you go out every day and you post good times, that builds upon itself day by day. You can feel better about being aggressive, and I think that’s a lot of what happened in ‘04. “Because we didn’t really have any bad rows, our confidence just built, and that manifested itself in the reality that we were rowing better and faster and all those things. “Whereas in 2000 we had the opposite happening, which was we’d have a bad row and the next day you go out and try harder, and if you have five or six bad rows, all of a sudden it isn’t ‘Well, we just had a bad row, and it’ll come back.’ what do we do?’”8209 Author Chris Ahrens Schubschlag with strong back swing Besides Bryan and coxswain Pete Cipol- lone, Chris was the only other holdover from 2000. Ahrens: “In terms of dealing with what happened in 2000, I essentially eliminated rowing and the Olympics and sports from my life. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to talk to people about it. I just want to move on with life, so I got married, moved to New York and got a job. “I had been working for a year or two, and one day I got out of the shower, looked in the mirror and said, ‘Wow, you have to start working out a little bit!’ So I started working out, and after a little while I decid- ed if I was actually going to spend an hour each day working out, ‘Well, why don’t I see if I can get in reasonable shape?’ “At the same time, the guys who were It’s ‘Oh my gosh, on the team at that point were doing well. They won a Bronze in ‘02, and they had been close, very competitive, and I knew it would burn me if they were to win an Olympic medal without me in ‘04. “I didn’t know if I could actually pull it 8208 See Chapter 155. 8209 Ahrens, op. cit. off with my work, but beginning in the fall of ‘02, I started training more intensely, and I figured if by the springtime I could be around 6:00 on the ergometer just training 2300
