SILVER CELEBRATION
Poetic genius gets most out of men’s eight team
At the team meeting the night before, the Canadian men’s eight talked over the race plan (chiefly, not to try to match the Germans out of the gate but rather wait and attack), what to focus on, and all the other technical/mechanical gewgaws of rowing.
Then Mike Spracklen, their beloved and beleaguered 74-year-old coach, did what he did four years earlier, at Beijing, when the team’s predecessor won gold.
Three of the veterans from that team are at the core of this one, and they remembered. Spracklen read a poem. When he’s feeling under the gun, under stress, he writes poetry. There’s a reason rowing is considered a gentleman’s sport, and the reason is that those it draws close tend to be both literate and cerebral — and given the year Spracklen has had, he may have written as many lines as the Iliad.
The poems “are sometimes quite funny,” Malcolm Howard, the team captain, said afterward. “And sometimes quite amazing.”
This time, Howard said, he’d written a long one. “He talks about our training all year, in poetry, and then he says some amazing words about each person . . . .
“If you guys are very lucky,” he told the reporters around him, “maybe you’ll get some lines from him.”
Spracklen would recite only the last couple, and said he couldn’t remember word for word what he’d read.
“But what I said was, ‘I have one last request, and I’ve never asked anyone before: Win the race for me.’”
They didn’t quite pull that off, but in an absolute monster of a battle — there were only 3.12 seconds separating first and sixth place — that had the crowd of 25,000 at Dorney Lake roaring, the Canadians raced with such intelligence, maturity and grit that they won silver.
There’s something so touching about this — and so wretchedly typical of amateur sport — that it breaks your heart: The proud coach making the request; his athletes responding so magnificently; the sport’s bureaucrats watching safely and measuring God knows what from shore.
My grandfather Andy Lytle, a longtime sports columnist with The Vancouver Sun, used to write about sports bureaucrats and officials; in his day, I think they were called “badgers,” no doubt because they are members of the weasel family. It appears little has changed.
A couple of years ago, on the heels of the Beijing triumph, Rowing Canada did an overhaul. Spracklen, according to Maclean’s writer Ken MacQueen, who wrote a wonderful piece on this two months ago, had his performance evaluation conducted by a basketball coach — fairly demeaning for a man whose charges have won 13 Olympic medals and twice that many world championship medals.
In the end, oversight of the entire men’s heavyweight program was stripped from Spracklen. He was left with the eights and two lightweight crews.
The perpetual knock against him is that he’s “divisive,” but the easy explanation of what has happened is that athletes who didn’t make the big boat in Beijing were bitter and complained about him, setting in motion the events that followed.
As he put it on Wednesday, “There’s only room for eight seats in a boat. And if you have a pyramid of 30 people, then you’ve got 22 enemies straight away.
“I’ve experienced that all my life,” he said. It’s absolutely normal, even expected, he said. It’s only “when the people in power take notice of those people, then we have a problem.”
Spracklen’s race plan here was perfect, his athletes said.
In the heats last weekend, the Canadians tried to stick with the world-beating Germans and burned themselves out, finishing dead last. They made it to the final via the repechage, where they rowed well enough to finish second but still not up to snuff.
As Spracklen said, “The first time they raced, they expended too much in the first quarter and paid dearly for it. So they just burned out. So they were steadied down ... then they took it the other way. They went off better, but rowed through the middle slower than they were capable of going.
“So the answer was to go off, find your rhythm first, then attack, as opposed to sprinting and hanging on. It was a different tactic.”
The men’s eights are to rowing what the 100-metre sprint is to track and field, the glamourpuss event. There are strong personalities, great expectations, and clashes are inevitable.
But consider the man who was in the seventh seat in the Canadian boat, Jeremiah Brown, a former McMaster University football player who started rowing only in 2009 and has been with the national team for less than two years.
“Thank God for that, Jerry being in seven seat was huge,” coxswain Brian Price said. “We needed him. Mike brought him in here: ‘Here’s a big guy. I can teach this guy to row.’ What other top coach does that? No one. They don’t want to develop a guy; Mike will develop a guy from almost nothing.”
Price kept the stroke rate at 38. The Brits started to die, and they died fast; the Canadian boat had them.
Four hundred metres out, Rob Gibson was giving so much he started dry-heaving. Howard felt nothing but the pure adrenalin rush. Price had to shout. Even with the cox box amplifier at maximum, the noise of the grandstand was deafening, closing in on them.
For all that, some of them surely heard Mike Spracklen’s soft voice from the night before: Win it for me.