THIS is the story of the boat that was cursed by the gods, but somehow the hero prevailed in the end. It’s not an original tale — it was all told in The Odyssey 2½ millennia ago. But on Saturday it was told again as Matthew Pinsent led the Great Britain coxless four to a gold medal. At the end of it all, he broke down and wept, as Homeric heroes do on a regular basis; Odysseus himself was never far from tears.
What had Pinsent done to offend the gods? Gods are notoriously touchy, as Odysseus learnt as the enmity of Poseidon pursued him for ten years. My own view is that the gods resented Pinsent’s brilliance. They thought he was challenging not himself but them. When that other epic hero, Steve Redgrave, retired after winning his fifth gold medal in Sydney four years ago, Pinsent teamed up with James Cracknell to form a pair, with the intention of winning his fourth gold medal in his fourth Olympic Games. And God, it was good. Too good, perhaps.
In 2001 they won the World Championship in the coxless pairs and then in the coxed pairs. You are not supposed to do that. The schedule doesn’t expect you even to try, because the finals were just 45 minutes apart. They didn’t receive massive national recognition because the rowing World Championships don’t count as one of sport’s sexiest events. All the same, it was one of the most remarkable feats of athleticism in sporting history. Winning a second world title while in recovery from winning the first changed ideas on what athletes can and cannot do.
A year later they won the coxless pairs in a world-record time. And that, the gods thought, was enough. Pinsent was making the gods envious and that cannot be tolerated. And so the boat was cursed, and every boat that Pinsent stepped into was cursed. Nothing else explains the events of the next two years.
In the World Championships of 2003, Pinsent and Cracknell suffered the most shattering and unexpected defeat. They finished fourth. Pinsent had not lost a race in the World Championships or the Olympic Games since 1991. His aura of invincibility was torn down on that fateful day in Milan.
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Was it just a bad day? Or was something radically wrong? Jürgen Grobler, the coach, made a huge decision. He sacked the pair and made it the backbone of a new four. The curse followed. Two men were sacked from the four; naturally, feelings ran high and deep. In fact, only one oarsman from that original four remained in the boat on Saturday, Steve Williams.
The troubles continued. Josh West was dropped. Cracknell was injured at a crucial moment. Ed Coode stepped in, rowed to a victory in a prep regatta, then was dropped as Cracknell came back. And then the final, desperate misfortune just a few weeks ago, when Alex Partridge suffered a collapsed lung and had to drop out. Coode came back in. You prepare an Olympic crew over the course of an Olympiad, nursing it to a series of minor peaks and priming it, minds, bodies and spirits, for the greatest event of them all. Four years. Pinsent’s crew had seven weeks.
On, then, to Saturday’s final. Pinsent’s crew took the lead and were overtaken. That should have been that. But they came back. That just doesn’t happen in rowing. They made a furious final effort. And desperately, traumatically, saw that it was not enough. The final curse, perhaps. “Why are they still ahead when we’ve been rowing so well?” Pinsent asked himself in wonder.
In The Odyssey, the gods’ enmity is at last overcome because Odysseus refuses to be beaten, and perhaps that is the essential heroic quality. It is precisely the quality that was demonstrated by this massive, complex, layers-deep man on the final page of his epic. Ten strokes to go, and Pinsent rowed them with a huge, a massive and utterly overwhelming outpouring of himself.
There were three other oarsmen: they took their cue from Pinsent. His will became theirs. They had done their best; Pinsent asked for something beyond that. What difference does the will of one man make in a crew of four giants? The difference was measured with absolute precision on Saturday. It makes a difference of eight hundredths of a second. The difference between silver and gold.
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Athletes always talk about “giving everything”. It is not often that a man actually does. No wonder that after the race, Pinsent was a husk, mind and spirit absent. Roger Bannister said that after breaking the four-minute mile he felt “like an exploded light bulb”. Pinsent was a shambling wreck of a man, sitting like a lost soul before the medal ceremony. The dam at last broke, the tears came, and shattered body and spirit were at last reunited.
And his Greek wife, his Penelope — actually Demetra — said with glorious appropriateness that it had been a desperate four years, but if he wanted to go on for another 16 years she would be content. Four years ago I had the ineffable privilege of writing book five of the Redgraviad. I never thought I would have a tale to equal it: still less a hero.