THE SPORT OF ROWING The race for the U.S. Coxless-Four on Eagle Creek Reservoir in Indianapolis in 1994 was superficially similar to the race in 1993. The crew again took the lead immediately but settled low to a 34½, letting the boat glide between strokes in the tailwind and looking very much less hurried than the previous year. However, their lead on the field never grew much beyond half a length. The Americans maintained that lead past the 1,500 when the Dutch, another boat coached by the globe-trotting Kris Korzeniowski, began their sprint ten strokes earlier than the U.S. and went by to win by a deck. It was Korzeniowski’s second consecutive Gold in the event for two different countries, and it was America’s and Buschbacher’s fourth consecutive Silver in the event behind three different countries. Frustratingly, the ‘93 and ‘94 Eights had also won Silver. Two years out of Dartmouth College, Annie Kakela had four Silver Medals, and the veteran Amy Fuller had five. The ‘95 World Champion Eight The 1994 FISA regatta in Indianapolis had been the first World Championships ever held in the United States, and after such encouraging results in 1993, settling for the Silver Medal in both the women’s fours and eights on home soil must have left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth. By ‘95, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics were fast approaching. Every single member of the latest U.S. Eight was already a World Silver Medalist, boasting twenty-six individual FISA Medals amongst them, so the desire to break through to the top of the podium in Tampere had to have been almost unbearable. The athletes surely felt it. The coaches surely felt it. The U.S. Rowing Association definitely felt it. The only personnel change from the 1994 Eight had been the return of Mary McCagg after a year in the coxless-pair. Every member of the superb 1994 Coxless- Four was back, and in 1995 they would be focusing on the eight alone, the women’s coxless-fours having just been removed from the Olympic program. The results in Tampere were fantastic: Silver in the pairs, Gold in the fours and Gold in the eights. Kakela, in the eight for the third consecutive year: “I remember rowing up to the line, and it was sort of laughable because the water conditions were so bad, but we all kept our heads in the boat in terms of what we’d been working on and what our goal was, which was to really make a statement. And it happened. “It definitely was one of those experiences where we felt prepared. I felt rested going into it. I felt mentally and physically completely ready to go for it. “I just remember that race being completely in control from start to finish, every stroke. The only thing that I was thinking in my mind was, ‘Stay clean. Don’t catch a crab,’ but otherwise, in terms of the race, I mean if you take the conditions out of it, as an eight I felt that we were very much well rehearsed for what we had to do, and it felt great! “That summer, ‘95, we had not been consistent in all of our racing, like in Lucerne we had not raced well, but we had been very consistent in training and in timed stuff that we had done going up to Worlds. “We just knew that if we were even in the hunt passing the first 500, we owned the middle 1,000. That’s what we had been training for, power in the weight room, erg scores, stuff like that. “We definitely knew that we were a strong crew, and that gave us the confidence in Tampere when we were right there or even up a little bit in the first 500. We just 2238