Team spirit gets Bennett over line
ROWING
IT requires talent to become an Olympic medallist. Some luck, inevitably, plays its part. Rowing had never been on Karen Bennett’s radar in her youth in Edinburgh.
Only by chance did she spot an advert called Sporting Giants. You sense she barely knew one end of an oar from the other. But barely seven years on, she stood clutching a silver medal in Rio yesterday after the British women’s eight willed themselves to an astonishing late rally on the waters of the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon.
It was more a slow burn than instant attraction when she first ventured out. “It was just a new challenge,” the 27-year-old recounted. “When you’re not very good at something, you think, ‘ Urgh, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it right? What am I doing?’
“But I think the people really make you stay in the sport. I made lots of friends, new people, and I really enjoyed it, taking on challenges together and overcoming them. That’s something we all do really really well. And it’s incredible when you do it with other people and you all have the same goal.”
The British squad certainly needed to pull together to avert disaster here, sitting dead last at the half-way point amid a pack left with a futile chase of the omnipotent Americans. Yet stroke by stroke, they made up ground as their cox Zoe deToledo urged them onwards, into third with 500m to go and then finally, and dramatically, adjudged to have snatched second in a photo finish from Romania by a mere 0.12 seconds.
“I didn’t know last at any time,” admitted Polly Swann, the other Edinburgher in the line-up. “It was a good job from Zoe to keep us in. But you could feel the crews around us working hard. We knew if we kept our rhythm, we could come out on top. The Americans are a really classy crew and hats off to them, they delivered a great race. But I can’t be more happy with how we did.”
A subsequent gold for the British men’s eight ensured the UK would finish top of the rowing medals table with five in total, one less than their target but hardly a disgrace. Pete Reed and Andrew Hodge savoured the title for the third Games in succession with their crew almost a second ahead of Germany with the Dutch back in third.
Worthing hanging on for another four years but Reed confessed his third crown had left him drained.
“My job is a five-seat, my job is to put as much work down as effectively as possible. “My first realisation was Scott Durant screaming behind me that we’d crossed the line and then I knew I could stop and the pain could stop.”