THE SPORT OF ROWING During that period, a typical week under U.S. Olympic coach Kris Korzeniowski7478 would include eleven workouts totaling less than thirty hours. Kiesling: “Korzeniowski and Topolski were, as one rower put it, ‘Poles apart.’”7479 Gill: “The first week’s training programme, dated 13 October 1986, included a total of nine outings on the water. The morning outings were scheduled for one and a half hours, whilst afternoon rowing was scheduled from 1:30 to 5:00pm. On top of the rowing, they were scheduled to complete three sessions in the gym, each two hours long, with track-running to finish, one timed run and a sixteen-minute workout on the ergometer (with the score noted and given to Macdonald ‘for the record’), to be completed in the rowers’ ‘spare time.’”7480 According to Topolski, Chris Clark quickly announced that the Americans “considered running superfluous and circuit training to be of little use. They would not do two sessions a day, especially on Saturdays. Sundays? NFW. “Sculling, too, was out.”7481 Topolski was a strong believer in single sculling and had for years included team singles head races in his selection criteria. Indeed, history teaches us that sculling is an effective training and selection tool for eights, but the Americans had no sculling background and “felt their time spent flailing around in [shells] to be rather wasteful . . . and they clearly felt that their time would be better spent training in pairs.”7482 The Boat Race Mystique British critics in the press, the team and the rowing community believed that what the Americans didn’t seem to appreciate was that their national coaches at home were preparing them for end-of-summer 2,000 meter races on smooth-water artificial courses while Topolski – the acknowledged master of the Boat Race – was preparing them for an end-of-English-winter four-plus mile race over a circuitous and viciously treacherous Thames tidal estuary course,7483 an entirely different challenge requiring entirely different skills, training and preparation. Tom Cadoux-Hudson, one of the British Oxonians, a 1981 World Bronze Medalist in the coxed-pairs and never a supporter of the Americans: “You could win a Gold Medal at the Worlds with an hour- an-a-half of training a day, but not the Boat Race. In the Boat Race you have to spring off and maintain aerobic function with lactic still in the system. The training is compacted – two months of endurance before getting ready to sprint. I think some [Americans] had fear of it.”7484 Perhaps not fear, but with their own words the Americans freely admitted that they felt none of the British reverence for the traditional annual challenge between Oxford and Cambridge, not as a hallowed institution, not even as an athletic event. Clark: “To be quite honest, I thought all that mystical Tideway bull♠ᵜ!♪ [Topolski] gave was just a ploy for the Press. If you knew anything about rowing, you couldn’t really believe in it.”7485 Dan Lyons: “Oh, the awesome, mythical Boat Race! Four miles on an often wind-aided, always deliberately tail-current 7478 See Chapter 124. 7479 Kiesling, op. cit., p. 90 7480 Gill, p. 40 7481 Topolski, p. 69 7482 Gill, p. 57 7483 See Chapter 4. 7484 Qtd. by Christopher Dodd, Unnatural Selection, p. 58 7485 Qtd. by Gill, p. 51 2088
