
The One That Got Away
A few kilometres to the north of Munich there is a man-made lake. Its banks are hazed with lavender, and the water is strangely clear. A concrete grandstand runs part way down one side, and at the northeastern end are wooden hangars: an inaccurate suggestion of aircraft. Aerial photographs give a sense of inversion, of a sky-blue landing strip slashed diagonally over fields. The lake is Oberschleissheim. It was built for the rowing and canoeing events at the Munich Olympic Games of 1972 and has hosted international competitions ever since.
In the spring of 2000 Bobby Thatcher is there, rowing in the British eight at a World Cup regatta. He will tell me years later that he remembers the heat. The other sensations—his pulse pounding in his ears, the mingling smells of his crewmates’ sweat or the adrenal nausea as the cox orders the boat to be backed onto the start pontoons—are too commonplace to mention. Racing in an eight is always about fear.
Sixty feet long, less than two feet wide and made out of the same ultra-light carbon fibre as a Formula One racing car, it is the biggest and fastest rowing boat. In a pair or a four, Bobby says, you are in control, but the eight is in control of you. The first tenth of the 2,000-metre course will be a sprint to generate speed, and the rest a fight to maintain it as muscles flood with lactic acid and capillaries in the lungs burst open. The crew that slows down the least will win. It is about Old Testament-level pain, and praying that this won’t be the time it kills you. The mental focus required is absolute.
Bobby is sitting in the bow seat, furthest back, and he looks over his shoulder to check the boat is straight in the lane. White buoys stretch away in rank and file under the sun. In the final 100m they turn red, but that’s too far away for Bobby to see. Perhaps he looks around for a moment too long—the cox has the boat well-aligned after all—but in that minute’s heated stillness before the start he sees two figures sitting on a towel on the sun-scorched bank of the lake. Immediately, his attention is diverted. The figures are women, with tanned skin and white-blonde hair, and they are naked except for bikini bottoms. The women are kissing each other and touching each other’s breasts, apparently oblivious to the men in rowing boats right in front of them. The men are oblivious too, staring straight ahead. All the men but one.
Bobby Thatcher thinks the women might be the most erotic thing he has ever seen. He taps the shoulder of Ben Hunt-Davis in the two seat, who turns, gives him a solemn manly handshake and never looks out of the boat. As the starter raises his flag and calls over the names of the competing countries, Bobby tries to block out thoughts of the women and concentrate on the race ahead. When the buzzer sounds, 48 of the world’s strongest men bend their oars—or “blades”—and in a surge of savagery and white water the boats are gone.
Five minutes and 27 seconds later, down past where the buoys turn red, Bobby Thatcher crosses the line first, and the British team have won another gold. When he tells his crew about the two women on the bank, they either don’t believe him or don’t care. You never, ever, look out of the boat.
Bobby has trained and won races with oarsmen you might have heard of: Matthew Pinsent, Steve Redgrave and Tim Foster, as well as less famous men such as Luka Grubor, Steve Trapmore and Simon Dennis. The latter names are the other gold medallists from the Sydney games, which you probably only recognise if you know a fair bit about rowing. But mention the name Bobby Thatcher to someone who knows about the sport, and that person is likely to wince. Because what happened to Bobby during his eight years in the British team is not something rowing people find comfortable to talk about.
He coaches rowing now, at Latymer Upper School in west London, and we met in 2004 when he interviewed me for a job. He was wearing board shorts and flip-flops; I felt faintly ridiculous in my tie. We talked technique over a cup of tea in his flat—which crews and which coaches we admired—then looked out of the window at the river. The Hammersmith bend sweeps down from Chiswick Eyot, past St Paul’s School and under the ornate green and gold metalwork of the bridge itself, and the stream runs fastest down a not-quite-central channel. It is a difficult place to steer with accuracy; enter it wrongly and it is too late to correct your course.
“Job’s yours if you want it,” said Bobby. “I know we normally wouldn’t get back to you till later, but the others have all been muppets.”
I think I laughed at that point. “Fair enough,” I said.
Rowing, in theory, is a very fair sport. There are no fumbled catches or goals against the run of play; the crew that is fastest on the day will win. And a global standard for assessing performance means that selection for crews is fair too. A beginner can get on a rowing machine (known as an ergometer, or ergo) in any gym, row 2,000 metres as fast as he or she can and measure themselves against any rower in the world. A woman in her first year of rowing should be aiming to take less than eight minutes, and a man will start to be taken seriously when he goes faster than seven. The relationship between effort and performance, as in all athletics, is non-linear; each second is more difficult to knock off than the last. A club oarsman who pulls 6:45 at the start of a season in September will be regarded as having made good progress if he does 6:30 in July; 6:20 a year later would be outstanding. When Bobby Thatcher was 18, he did it in 6:08, the fastest time for a junior in Britain that year.
And for a sport that mostly involves the rich (a new racing eight costs £30,000), rowing is remarkably democratic. Large annual time trials known as “head races” are run on the Thames in London each winter; this year’s Head of the River Fours take place on Sunday 14th November. The course is four and a quarter miles from Chiswick to Putney (the reverse of that used for the Oxford-Cambridge boat race), and there are separate events for different classes of boat. Crews from novice to international level compete against each other. The Women’s Eights Head is one of the largest all-female sporting events in the world, with some 2,000 athletes competing, and the Men’s Eights Head is bigger again by a half.
Tideway heads are special. Up to 500 boats from Britain, Europe and further away will row up to the start. Crews of schoolboys and old men. Students arrive in clapped-out buses from distant universities, race in a boat held together with duct tape and come 350th, then drive home. Each club has its own racing kit which, along with the painted and patterned blades, makes the day look like a medieval pageant or joust.
The boats start one behind the other. Slower must give way to faster. There is clashing and crying out, allegations of mistiming, obstruction, robbery; the fastest crew down the course will win, but many feel they have fair claim. From above, it would look like a race of spears. Bright spears on brown water fighting for the fast deep channel that runs wide around the bends. Cut the corners and you will find dead water; the mudflats by Craven Cottage seem to draw crews onto them as if sirens are calling from the Fulham Wall. The finish looks closer if you go that way, but it is a place of stagnation and defeat.
To enter a head race is to buy a ticket for your crew versus the world. There is no limit to how well you can do. In the 2008 Fours Head, a quad scull from Westminster School came sixth out of 471 crews, beating all but a handful of top-ranked adult men. In the year that Bobby Thatcher topped the British rankings on the rowing machine, he won the Junior World Championships in the Great Britain coxless four.
Selection for the British team, junior or senior, is democratic too. If an athlete’s ergo score beats an annually dictated cut-off, he can turn up to the trials in October. Here he will be timed in his single scull over a 5km course and, if fast enough, invited to the next round in December. Final selection is in April and has the upcoming athletes racing on a 2,000-metre straight-lane course against the established internationals. Win and you’re in; reputation counts for nothing. You don’t get picked for a national football team like that.
*****