Image credit: World Rowing
For much of the history of Olympic rowing, there were no centralised team structures and instead countries nominated individual crews from clubs around their country. Across this era, the United States dominated the men’s eights. They amassed eleven wins from thirteen entries with Vesper Boat Club, the US Naval Academy, the famous boys in the boat from Washington and others picked up victories against the best of the world.
So, when the national federation moved to a selection-based system where the best from around the country could come together in an all-star team, one would expect the success to continue. However, this was not the case. Since 1972, where the legendary Harry Parker selected many of his own Harvard alumni to form the first true national team, they have only once won Olympic gold in the blue ribband event. 20 years on from their success in Athens, we look back on their journey to the gold medal with the help of 1988 bronze medallist and coach of the 2004 crew: Mike Teti.
By the late 80s, the familiar system of US Rowing had organised, with athletes littered across the country in a number of ‘performance centres’ dotted across the country, before racing and training together at centralised events. “We’d have these little camps, everyone raced at Nationals and then we’d have our final selection camp in Princeton and that boat was selected,” Coach Teti recalled. “[In 1988] it wound up being eight of the nine guys of the previous eight that raced in 1987 who actually won the gold medal [at the World Championships]. Once the boat was selected, we trained for a few weeks in Hanover, New Hampshire up at Dartmouth and then hit the west coast. – we were in Newport Beach – and then to the Olympics.”
This boat, training together over the summer, was granted extra time to train together by virtue of the late September games that year to avoid the heat of the South Korean summer. They won a bronze medal behind a West German crew they had comfortably beaten 13 months previously at the Copenhagen world championships.
16 years later, the system remained largely the same. “The way the system was, you had an erg test, and then you had – what they call speed order races in pairs and then the top so-many pairs were invited to the selection camp”. The was one important difference: they had a centralised training centre in Princeton, New Jersey.
The group in Princeton was a diverse one as Coach Teti cast his net far and wide. Only two of the crew had been recruited to major programmes whilst the remainder were spread across lower-level varsity programmes as well as club squads as obscure as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. One story Teti points to is of eventual stroke man Bryan Volpenheim, who attended a regional identification camp which consisted of a 6k erg test as well as some water sessions.
“Bryan was the top 6k at one of the ID camps – I had no idea who he was. And then I thought – he was at Ohio State, which was a club programme, wasn’t even a varsity programme – if a guy like that was in a varsity programme, he’d be immense. So, we invited him to our under 23 camp and then he wound up being the best at that camp – he would have made the boat probably in 1997 but he broke a rib. Then in ’98, he was still at Ohio State, he shows up, goes through selection, wins all his switches, makes the boat and wins the gold medal [at the Senior World Championships]”
Despite their differences, this crew just gelled. Training together for the entire season, the group of 12 spent most of their season racing against each other in coxless fours. This is the only time in the national squad era the crew had trained together all year, and the top eight guys became “interchangeable” with racing going back and forth, regardless of lineup, breeding the constructive, competitive training environment that every coach desires.
When the crew finally returned to the eight, they all knew they were going to be fast but one of their first sessions in the crew was a 1500 metre piece on Lake Mercer. Coach Teti recalls: “I had had three [world championship] gold medal eights and the fastest time we had ever gone in Princeton for 1500m was 3:59.66, and the first piece we did in this boat was like 3:57. So we knew right away it was a pretty good boat.”
Despite this obvious speed, when you review the crews they raced at the World Rowing Cup in Lucerne, the crew did not race together. “I didn’t want to send that eight to Lucerne,” Coach Teti paused, “I didn’t send that boat because I thought they would win – you really only get that element of surprise once. So, what I did is I sent four of the guys to race at Lucerne in the coxless four and then the other guys rowed in an eight.
“Of course the four won by open water, and I didn’t go. So I was worried these guys might want to row the four rather than the eight. So when they flew back, the bus came back to Princeton and Volpenheim says ‘don’t worry coach we still want to row the eight’.”
Ultimately this would prove to be the correct decision. In the first competitive heat they would race together, they set a new world best time before winning the final comfortably. Bringing Olympic glory back home to their Princeton Training Center, this crew demonstrated the immense value in spending time together, producing one of the greatest eights that the world has ever seen.
This year, the US Men’s eight has been training together as Seattle, Washington since March under the direction of Mike Callahan. At Lucerne they pushed the world champions close to win silver, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to win the first gold for the US Men’s rowing team since this race in 2004.
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