THE WORLD COMES FULL CIRCLE (For everyone privileged to know Mike Teti personally, I am sure they realize that the previous quote has been heavily edited for family audiences.) Volpenhein: “Carl Lewis actually calmed me down quite a bit. I was really nervous before he came over, and he didn’t know anything about rowing or about us or about the history of rowing, and he talked us through our race. ‘Go out and win! That’s all you have to do,’ and the simplicity of it was . . . I was really calm after that. The Heat Volpenhein: “Our whole crew was ex- tremely relaxed the whole regatta. Like be- fore the heat, there was like a five-minute delay, and it was 100° out, and we were tell- ing jokes, hanging out. Compare that to 2000, when there wasn’t a word spoken the whole time, just tension building. “If your mind is not loose and your emotions aren’t loose, your rowing’s not going to be loose.”8252 Ed Hewitt, taking photos for row2k: “When the men’s eights heats came in to the starting blocks, I had posted up early to be able to get a photo of the crew going off the line because if they win the heat and you don’t get that shot, you don't see them at the start again for the rest of the regatta. “They pulled in, and I was keeping a very low profile, and Chris Ahrens says, ‘Row2k – Hey, Eddie! How’s it going?’ and waves. Chip gave me his standard greeting of ‘Big Ed.’ J.R. chimed in. Bryan did as well, and the guys were waving – so I answered back, and I remember very clearly thinking, ‘Well, either these guys are just way too loose and are going to be terrible, or everyone else out here is in real trouble.’ “The other crews were completely dif- ferent, barking at each other, cursing and 8252 Volpenhein, op. cit. rattling their oars in the locks, and these guys were yelling to me like they were my neighbors, which they were. “It was extraordinary, and so I took my pictures, jumped in the back of a pickup truck headed to the finish line, chased the race, and bolted beyond the finish to get their photo [following page] going under the bridge. “It was an hour before I got back to the media center and saw they had set a world record, and recalling the events up at the starting line, I just laughed out loud standing there looking at the results page.”8253 The Final Cipollone: “I felt that the lizard part of my brain was dominating everything that day, that everything was just happening on instinct from practice and having worked together so closely. It was like a perfect machine. “You can have extraordinary talent. We had that. “You can have extraordinary training. We had that. “You can have extraordinary and in- spired coaching. We had all of that stuff in spades. “But on that final day, there was also this intangible thing that was saying to us, ‘You know in your heart that you’re going to have the absolute best performance that you can possibly have,’ and you don’t really think about whether or not that means you’re going to win. You just think, ‘Now we’re going to go fast today.’ “And nobody can summon that on de- mand. It is still one of the great unknowns in sport . . . “It’s not widely known, but that morn- ing we got down there nice and early, and everybody kind of went their own way. Everybody did something different. Some 8253 Hewitt, personal correspondence, 2011 2311
