The Kiwi Pair by Eric Murray

Author:Eric Murray [Murray, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743487310
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

9

Eric Murray

To the Top

GARY ROBERTSON KNEW I would love Lenggries, and he was right. He had fond memories of his time there with the eight in the lead-up to the Munich Games, and now I knew why. I don’t know if I had ever consumed so much beer in my life. Towards the end of our stay, we made a decision as a crew to avoid the pleasures of the town as much as possible and get back to work. Hamish and Carl required no convincing, of course, and while James was a little limited on account of his wrist, we began to increase our efforts on the oars and finished our camp feeling good about the World Championships.

Munich was a special place for New Zealand rowing. It was the scene of arguably its greatest victory, when the Rusty Robertson-coached men’s eight of Trevor Coker, Athol Earl, John Hunter, Tony Hurt, Dick Joyce, Gary Robertson, Wybo Veldman, Lindsay ‘Lew’ Wilson and cox Simon Dickie had claimed the gold medal ahead of the much more fancied and well-funded crews from the USA and East Germany.

International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, a deeply controversial figure, was said to be so overjoyed, having been a long-time opponent of the creeping professionalism of the Olympic athletes, that he presented the medals himself.

It was a defining win not just for the sport, but for the nation, too. The New Zealanders received their medals and prepared themselves to sing ‘God Save The Queen’ as the New Zealand flag was raised over the pontoon. Instead, and for the first time at an Olympic Games, the first strains of ‘God Defend New Zealand’ began to play. The eight was visibly moved by the gravity of their win and that moment. Theirs would be New Zealand’s only gold medal of the Games (the coxed four of Dickie, Dick Tonks, Dudley Storey, Ross Collinge and Noel Mills had claimed silver earlier in the day).

The Regattastrecke Oberschleißheim is a purpose-built rowing course to the north-west of Munich, situated among the greenbelt farms on the city’s edge, in the compact satellite suburb of Oberschleißheim. Its light blue waters were crystal clear and, on either side, cycle tracks ran the length of the course. On the eastern side a concrete grandstand towered over the finish line.

For all its precise German construction, the Munich course had one mysterious peculiarity: it was famously slow. There are some courses in the world on which you know good times will be set and others, for reasons that have confounded even the most knowledgeable aficionados, on which it is impossible to set anything close to world-best times. We knew this as we hit the lake for our first two-kilometre time trial and, when the time came in, Chris was concerned. We thought we had gone all right, but he was convinced we needed to do it again. We looked at Carl, Carl looked at Chris and, by the end of the shortest meeting in history, the thought of another time trial was banished for good.

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