THE WORLD COMES FULL CIRCLE guys erged. Some guys stretched. Some guys read a book. Somebody probably went off and took a nap. “But when we got on the water it was really hot, probably 95° or higher, and it was 9:55 in the morning or something, and it was only going to get hotter. Our normal warm- up took about twenty-two minutes and would put us over by the starting line about seven or eight minutes before the 10:30 start time, and it started out with six minutes of light to medium steady state below 20 strokes a minute. Then after that we would do a bunch of 15s and get like a hundred hard strokes in before we did the piece. “So we’re going along. We’re four minutes into our six-minute steady state and we’re sitting down by the bridge8254 getting ready to turn around and finish the piece, and it’s 10:07. It’s ridiculously early, and Volp says, ‘Hang on a second.’ “I say, ‘What’s up?’ “He says, ‘Dude, I’m warm.’ “I was thinking, ‘Oh no! This is not a time to have an intraboat squabble about how much warm-up we have to do.’ We had done no high 15s, no full pressure, noth- ing! “So I said to the guys, ‘Hey, Volp’s feeling warm. How is everybody feeling?’ and from bow down, it just was, ‘I’m good’ ‘I’m warm,’ ‘I feel great,’ ‘Yeah, this is good. Let’s go do it!’ “And I just went, ‘Wow! . . . Okay!’ The unanimity of the guys was just extraor- dinarily high in terms of ‘Hey, if Volp’s warm, then I’m good. I’m ready to go.’ “And so we pulled out of the warm-up loop, left the five other eights and went and sat under the bridge. The women’s eights race hadn’t even come down yet. That’s how early it was. 8254 A bridge separates the warm-up area in the return channel from the race course at about 550 meters after the start. It can be seen clearly in satellite photos. Google map “Schinias, Greece.” “It was weird. When the women’s eights went by, maybe a couple of guys looked out real quick, and I would have thought somebody would have yelled some- thing for the women because I think they were leading at the time,8255 but we were so focused that nobody even noticed. “We pulled into our lane something like fifteen minutes early. We were the first crew there by a mile! We did a couple of starts and kind of paddled back to the start- ing area and waited for everyone else to get there. “Part of the reason I’ve never told this story is that it’s probably not a good practice for somebody else to try, and it didn’t occur to me until months later that had we lost, there would have been some consequences for us not having warmed up, but it was ee- rie how everybody was so singularly fo- cused on the same thing. It was like, ‘Okay, if we’re ready to go . . . we’re ready to go.”8256 The rest is history. Ahrens: “I knew Chip and I had a simi- lar experience, which was . . . I think that 2000 had been so caustic in some ways, but at the same time, he and I both thought, ‘Well, let’s go do this and see if we can ex- orcise some of those demons.’ “I also think that we had a similar feel- ing which was this was our opportunity, and if we were going to go down, we were going to go down on our terms.”8257 Teti: “In the headwind there was just a ton of acceleration and a ton of time. That first 700 meters Bryan was settling in, and then when they were where they wanted to be at the rhythm they wanted, our boat never went up. They just maintained. They were just defending from that point.”8258 8255 See Chapter 157. 8256 Cipollone, op. cit. 8257 Ahrens, op. cit. 8258 Teti, op. cit. 2313
