THE ERA OF POLARIZATION so gracious. Ginny Gilder was more up- front aggressive, but no match for Joan’s quiet aggressiveness.”7764 Leg compression at the entry in the 1984 boat spanned a range from minimal (Anne Marden, Princeton ‘81) to maximal (Ginny Gilder, Yale ‘79). Rickon: “Surge to the release. That’s what we tried to do. We tried to accelerate through the drive, and that was a big change for Anne and Lisa in the bow-pair.”7765 Lisa Rohde (Penn, ‘80) drove her legs down much faster than the others, occasionally even shooting her tail slightly, betraying her Modern Orthodox Kernschlag East Coast college roots. Both she and Marden hit the catch explosively in contrast to the Schubschlag force application pattern of Gilder and Lind in the stern-pair. This discrepancy was the crucial difference between Romania and the USA, between Olympic Gold and Silver. Rickon: “Poor Anne. She had the most trouble. “She is an incredible athlete. In 1984 she could not sit still. She always got jobs wherever we were training. Everyone else would fall asleep during the day, take it easy, but not Anne. She’d get a retail job, standing on her feet all day.” “Today she’s a VP for a brokerage house in London, incredibly smart, still incredibly driven. Training Rickon: “One thing that John did that was kind of exciting, different from any other coach that I’ve ever had, is that he had us approach the 1,000 meters as a whole rather than as parts, you know, first 20, power 10s, last 20, etc. “He also did tempo training. He figured out what he believed would be the 7764 Mitchell, op. cit. 7765 Ibid. winning pace for the whole race, and then he broke it down into time for every 100 meters. We would do pieces as fast as we could, and he would time us each 100. As soon as we fell behind the pace and didn’t hit the mark for that 100, he would have us stop. “The first time we did it, we could only get 100 meters, but by the end we were doing 600 meters. I thought it was a really interesting training method.”7766 These were four superb athletes, America’s best and brightest. Frames 3 through 6 on the previous page clearly show the effectiveness of the middle of their pullthrough after the bow-pair’s initial hit had dissipated, and this was what earned them their Olympic Silver. Joan Lind, after the race: “We’ve all been single scullers. We’ve all been tops in the nation at some time, and it’s been a real pleasure for us all to row together. We all respected each other and knew what we each could do. “We’re a real team and the work together has really paid off.”7767 The Quad Sculls Final Rickon: “We had practiced jumping the start, which was customary back then, but they called us for a false start in the final. After they called everybody back, we had to actually wait for the next command, and when the race came off, we ended up last off the line.”7768 All the crews got off the line at 40-plus, and West Germany quickly moved out to a deck-length lead, with Romania second and the U.S. at the tail of the still very closely- bunched field. 7766 Ibid. 7767 Lind, ABC Television Olympic coverage. 7768 Mitchell, op. cit. 2165
