THE ERA OF POLARIZATION London. My dad, Terry Hunter, taught me. He was the chief coach down at the club. He was coaching junior athletes who were going to the junior team and that sort of thing. I was doing other sports, and then I decided that rowing was the one that I saw myself being good at. “I watched the ‘92 Olympics, and I saw Jonny and Greg Searle win in the coxed- pairs,7646 and seeing them achieve that, something unique and special, it kind of captured me with the emotion they had on the medal podium. That race was just so exciting. It just made the sport interesting. That was why I wanted to do it. “I went to the Junior World Championships for a couple of years7647 and three in the Under-23s,7648 and then I had to go from being a heavyweight to a lightweight, and that was a good challenge in itself. I was around 82 to 84 kilos,7649 in that bracket, and a lot of people said, ‘You’re never going to be able to do it. You’re too big!’ I don’t know if these were people who really thought I could and were just jealous that I was going to try. You never know. “I gave myself two years to make weight, and I made it in the first season. I was in the lightweight eight in 2001, and then the top four guys were taken into the four the following year. Athens Hunter: “I rowed in the coxless-four from 2002 to 2004. We had the athletes, but for some reason the program we were Observatory. It is believed to be the third oldest rowing club in Great Britain. 7646 See Chapter 133. 7647 7th in the quads in 1995 and 8th in the quads in 1996. 7648 10th in the quads in 1997, 11th in the doubles in 1998 and 8th in the doubles in 1999 7649 181 to 186 lb. following and the way we were rowing just wasn’t effective. We spent a lot of years with good individuals but could not get it together as a crew. “In Athens, we came thirteenth in the lightweight fours, which was last, which is pretty depressing. To go to the biggest spectacle you’ve ever dreamed of competing at and then doing the worst performance you could ever think of was . . . not good. “When I go to corporate things and do talks, everybody just assumes you’re a winner from the word go, and that’s what it is, but they don’t realize what went on behind the scenes for me and how much had to change, what I had to do differently, coming back from that huge disappointment to give it another four years to get it right this time. “I met a lot of athletes at the Athens Olympics who had failed in Sydney but then came back and won medals four years later, and they told me, ‘Don’t worry. It’s a learning experience. You’ll come back. You’ll be fine.’ I couldn’t see how I was going to get from being last . . . to first . . . because it just seemed completely different, worlds apart. “When I came back to Leander, I was wondering what to do, whether I could actually do it for another four years with possibly the same disappointment at the end. My coaches there, who were Mark Banks and Rob Morgan, just said, ‘You’ve got all the essentials. You can do it. We just need to find you someone else to do it with in the lightweight double. That’s what we are going to go for.’ “What was kind of weird is that when I was in the four, I would watch the lightweight doubles. I thought they were just phenomenal people because that event to me is one of the hardest in rowing, apart 2125
