Dead in the water

But how could it be so simple? We allowed our minds to wander back to Sydney and the lightweight four, suggesting to ourselves that we had been suckered by the hype again. Before those Games word had seeped from the training camp that the crew were doing world record times in training. They had only been assembled at Easter but by September we expected them to be on the podium. They sank. After the B final their standing at the regatta was 11th. As a four they never rowed together again. The level of expectation had plainly been ludicrous.

This time, though, it was different. Lynch and Gearoid Towey had both been world champions before they came together as a pair. When they took bronze at the world championships last summer it was the first time that an Irish crew had won a world championship medal in an Olympic discipline. The structures and funding in Irish rowing had never been better and it allowed Lynch and Towey to train full-time for the last year, at the best training camps in Europe, under one of the most successful coaches in the history of rowing. Their prospects weren’t an illusion.

Defeat couldn’t be as simple as Lynch was making out. It wasn’t.

THE final hours before their semi-final on Thursday morning turned into a panic. As a lightweight pair their combined weight must not exceed 140 kilos and neither one of them can be more than 72.5 kilos.

At 6’ 3” Lynch is three inches taller than Towey, so his target racing weight is 71 kilos (11 stone 4 pounds) and Towey’s is two kilos less, just under 11 stone.

For both men making those weights is a constant struggle, a matter of penitential sacrifice and fine judgment. On Thursday they got it wrong. Their own weighing scales assured them that they were fine; the official weighing scales screamed that they were over. They had to waste. Instantly.

“They controlled the weight on the balance (weighing scales,” said Nilsen, “and the balance showed OK but the balance was not correct. It was not an official one. When they came to weigh in they were overweight so they had to go and lose even more weight. They should have weighed in two hours before but they could only weigh in one hour before and of course there was no time to fill up the body. It was a typical example of dehydration .

. . I have been afraid of that all the time and today it happened. If they had been filled up and recharged as they should, they should have been in the final.

“Today they had to fight. They were out at six o’clock in the morning rowing to break it down (the weight but it was not enough. They had to come back to the ergometers (rowing machines to get the weight down and of course they didn’t weigh in until it was too late.

“Normally they have two hours at least to fill up the body with some liquid at least and today there was no time. . . With the weight loss they had to do in the last minute, they lost capacity.”

The procedures allow you to weigh in two hours before a race and insist that you make the weight an hour beforehand. It would be their normal routine to weigh in with about half an hour to spare and eat bread and jam afterwards to give their systems an injection of carbohydrates and sugar before they row. On Thursday the comfort of their routine was shattered.

The only way for rowers to lose weight quickly on the morning of a race is to sweat it out working hard on a rowing machine, their bodies steam-boiled in extra layers of clothing. On bodies as spare and lean as theirs with no body fat to burn, all they can shed is water and the outcome is debilitating. Nilsen says they went onto the lake dehydrated on Thursday and when the race turned into a dogfight in the last few hundred metres they simply didn’t have the power to match their hearts.

For the pair such a situation was calamitous. In conversation just three weeks ago Towey spoke about the perils of wasting: “In boxing and horse racing (with jockeys they’ve got this culture where they just sweat. We can’t do that because we’d lose so much energy. We obviously sweat off the last kilo but we don’t try to do any more than that. A kilo of body weight is an awful lot of energy.”

Tony O’Connor is assistant coach to Nilsen but his principal concern is the lightweight four whose semi-final took place 10 minutes after Towey and Lynch. He watched their race on a television screen at the venue and his sight was far better than the naked eye; he could tell there was a serious problem: “They didn’t have the same sparkle, the same strength. In rowing, if you look like you’re pulling hard you’re not rowing the boat as efficiently as you can be. The boys were working very hard just to get a certain boat speed out of it. They rowed well technically, it just looked to me that it was a physical thing.”

As a pair they have managed to control their weight, but not easily. Two months ago, when Towey became ill, Nilsen raised the issue again.

He had wanted them to abandon the hellish demands of racing lightweight a year ago but they both believed it was where their medal chance lay. “I don’t like his weight (Gearoid’s,” said Nilsen, “and I don’t like Sam’s weight.”

Lynch usually has more weight to lose than Towey and in the winter Towey will still be more than a stone over his racing weight. After the world championships last year Lynch said he put up a stone and a half in two weeks of just helping himself to everyday indulgences: pizza, ice cream, butter. Released from the grip of dieting, his body weight bounced to its natural state. In his newspaper diaries over the last six months food cravings and self-denial have been a recurring theme.

“People say to me that at 6ft 3ins I should perhaps try being a heavyweight,” he said back in March. “My stomach makes the suggestion every day. I can’t win the Olympics at heavyweight though. My stomach says, ‘So what?’ Some of the guys you see in a heavyweight boat make Shane Horgan look small. And Shane is a big man. These guys are six foot eight, one hundred and five kilos. I wouldn’t have a hope. I’d like to try it for the pleasure of escaping pasta and tomato sauce but that’s all.”

The detail of their weight management is extraordinary: “We eat pastas and all that kind of stuff,” said Towey earlier this month, “but you have to worry about the way it’s cooked. If it’s cooked in oil you can’t have it. We had to tell them here in the hotel (in Zagreb that you can’t cook anything with oil, it has to be water only . . . It’s been a long time since we’ve had a summer where we didn’t have to diet. It’s a stress and it’s a worry. You want to have a summer where it’s normal.”

Normally they would weigh themselves every second day. Closer to competition they would do it twice a day. On the day before competition they would do it five or six times. Going to bed on Wednesday night they would have known they had some work to do the following morning.

Dieting alone is hard but combined with their training work load it is brutal. Repeatedly they push themselves to the point of breakdown, already intimate with the pain they’re about to embrace again. “During the winter,” said Towey, “you just feel like a dead man walking because you’re loading the body all the time. You’re just pouring training on training all the time.”

At the beginning of the summer Towey’s system cracked under the strain. He felt unwell at the Duisberg regatta but ploughed on. At the Lucerne regatta a week later, though, he couldn’t keep going and their boat had to be scratched from the final. They went home, took a week off from training and Towey got the medical attention he needed.

It was widely described as a cold which, neglected, turned into a virus. Nilsen said it was a common enough condition among elite rowers in heavy training but he described it in such a way that made it harder to dismiss: “When people get overloaded and overtrained and their immune system is low they can get these things and it attacks certain nerve systems in the body and that’s what’s happening with him . . . With him it seems as if he has also had an infection because his limbs are swollen and painful. So it is a combination of many things.”

The rumour in Irish rowing, repeated on internet chat rooms, was that Towey was suffering from shingles but that had never been said officially until O’Connor mentioned it in his post-race interview on Thursday. Dropped into conversation in such a way that he assumed everyone knew.

“I know with shingles,” he said, “it can disappear after 10 days or it can linger for months afterwards. He (Towey has been performing very well in training, he’s been in good form, he looks healthy and he’s felt strong. One would think it’s probably gone but, you know, you get a situation like this when you need to lose a little bit of weight — the added pressure that comes with that, that could push somebody over the edge. But I couldn’t tell you that — you’d have to ask Gearoid that.”

After Towey’s short recuperation, they returned to training camp in Sweden and pushed themselves to the limit again. “We’ve both been nervous,” wrote Lynch in his diary. “So has Thor. The worry that the bug would linger has been intense . . . On the first Saturday morning we did a full and savage session. He’s fine. It’s a relief. Book closed.”

But was it? Before the heats last weekend Nilsen was asked for his thoughts: “If all else is equal and if “Gags” (Towey is fit we should be able to take them (the other boats.” If Towey was definitely in the clear why did Nilsen have to say “if”? They rowed well last Sunday. Won their heat with the kind of authority you’d expect from two outstanding athletes. On Thursday Lynch mentioned it in passing. “The row on Sunday,” he said, “was a reflection of our ability.” He knew what they’d been through on Thursday morning; and for the last week and for the last year and for the last two years. More than we can ever know. All they needed was two more rows like Sunday’s. Or maybe just to survive Thursday and buy time to re-group.

Nilsen briefly considered the future. What they might do as a pair or with others or in single sculls. What he struggled to see was another campaign as a lightweight pair. What he refused to countenance was another morning like Thursday: “We will learn,” he said. “We will never try this again, that’s for sure.”

AT THE regatta, though, there has been happiness too. You will probably know by now the fate of the lightweight four in the Olympic final this morning but that’s not even half of the story. For Paul Griffin, Richard Archibald and Eugene Coakley the great adventure has barely begun. For Niall O’Toole it is behind him and in front of him and all around him.

O’Toole is 33 now, the others in their mid-20s, young enough to have seen the light of O’Toole’s star at his greatest height. Griffin says he has a video at home of O’Toole at the 1994 world championships “and I watched that thing I’d say 50 times.” O’Toole took silver, three years after he had become the first Irishman to win gold at a world championships. From a sport that existed on the periphery of Irish consciousness his name entered the mainstream.

And in the bad years that meant nothing. In 1992 he contracted hepatitis and though he went to the Games in Barcelona, he didn’t have the strength to do himself justice. A year later he was broke. To keep going he borrowed from family and friends and persuaded the AIB to write off a couple of credit card bills. Then, at the beginning of 1994, he left Ireland for Nottingham, trained with the English national squad and put his head down in the attic room of a cheap digs.

“It was a s***hole, but I had to get out of Ireland. I felt everything was just really negative here. I felt when I didn’t build on ’91 that people were saying ‘Ah, he’s not worth a curse’. It was total paranoia from my perspective but it was probably a good paranoia in the end.”

His silver at the world championships in 1994 generated enough grants and sponsorship to keep going until the 1996 Games. This time, incompetence begot disaster. The crews weren’t selected until three weeks before the Games. “It was like,” he said, “the starter saying ‘Ireland, you stay there — now the rest of you can go’.”

“In 1997 I trained really hard,determined to get back into it and get a medal (at the world championships. I needed a medal to pull me out for another year. If I got a gold medal I knew I could hit a sponsor for a good few bob to keep going in the sport. It didn’t happen. I didn’t get my medal.”

The stress on his body and his spirit caused his health to fail and he quit rowing. He enlisted on a FAS course and got a job with Golden Pages. “I just said to myself, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I wanted to get a balance into my life. Seven minutes (in the championship race at the end of the year decided whether your life was a failure or a success. Rowing is not like others sports. There is no grand prix circuit like athletics, no prize money, no appearance fees. You have one chance in the year to make it pay. It was just too much pressure.”

After three months he returned to the water, but it was two years before he left his job and allowed rowing to arrange his waking hours again. He rowed hard for Sydney but when he and Derek Holland didn’t qualify, he walked away. Nilsen was no longer in the set-up and O’Toole had no faith in the structures that existed.

When Nilsen returned, though, O’Toole followed. The Olympics had left a void in his career which he couldn’t ignore in peace: “My wife was the big person, saying, ‘Listen, you have to go for it.’ She really got me back and patched me up mentally and physically.” A virus destroyed his preparation for the world championships last year and at a training camp in Belgium he was forced to prove his fitness and couldn’t. Failing to make the team meant that he wasn’t entitled to any funding. The sports council came in late but that didn’t inform his decision to continue. He was going again. Headlong. “It took me about 12 months to get back into shape. Last year I wasn’t really humming. This year I really nailed it. My times on the rowing machines got back to where I was in the early 1990s ... It’s been a massive struggle — a really tough struggle. I can’t say how much of a struggle it’s been.” With the rowers we can never know. They can tell us every detail of their existence and it only scratches our ignorance. O’Toole has been where Lynch and Towey were this week and come back. We look forward to the day we celebrate their return.