The secret of our success
Bond and Murray exclusive book extract
T here were just 10 days to go until the heats of the men’s pair at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and I was sitting on the side of the road, a few kilometres from our training base in Lucerne, covered in blood, wondering what part of me was broken.
Earlier that day we had rowed one of the toughest training sessions of our life, racing the New Zealand double sculls crew of Robbie Manson and Chris Harris into a stiff headwind down the Lucerne course. It was our final session before heading to Brazil, and once we were off the water our boats were packed away, ready for shipping. Hamish and I had decided to keep our road bikes with us, although we were under strict instructions not to do any more training until we hit the Olympic course at Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas in Rio.
So much for that idea. With our bodies stiff after the last session, we decided to loosen up with one last ride. We had two full days of travel ahead, during which there would be no time for any form of exercise. That would be, in Hamish’s word, “sub- optimal”. A casual pedal around the picturesque Swiss countryside couldn’t do us any harm, surely. We both thought it was a way to stay ahead of our programme and the opposition.
It had been that sort of season for us, one in which we sought every possible advantage. Hamish had become obsessed with the set- up of the boat, making minute adjustments to the rigging in the search for every last scintilla of speed. Noel Donaldson and I would roll our eyes at every new measurement, but Hamish’s theory was always the same: if it makes the boat feel better and makes it easier to work harder, then it couldn’t hurt. We had to accept his rationale, and his hunches were invariably right. It wasn’t just the rigging of the boat that had concerned him, it was the boat itself. We had ordered a brand new shell from Empacher for the European season, but as soon as we had rowed our first session in it in Sursee, ahead of the Lu- cerne World Cup in May, we knew something wasn’t quite right. Hamish had immediately felt his back tighten up, and every stroke seemed to require a massive effort. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the boat, it just didn’t feel like our boat.
We persisted for the rest of the week, trying to familiarise ourselves with the particular idiosyncrasies of the new shell, but we just couldn’t seem to find a rhythm. Instead, Hamish’s back became steadily worse, to the point where he didn’t know whether he would be able to race in our first world cup of the season. He had already spent the first two months of the new season out of the boat with a back problem caused, in true Hamish fashion, by training the house down before Christmas. That had meant a slow return to training together in the pair. A part of us didn’t mind the time to