The US men's four placed fifth after experiencing equipment trouble in a wild final that saw two crews nearly collide, as well as an Italian sub win an Olympic medal after one crew member tested positive for Covid-19.
row2k: You guys come from training pretty remotely, going to work every day on ferries and buses, to an Olympic final with an Olympic best time at the front. That's a super rapid acceleration and this is your time to talk about that experience and how you dealt with it to get to where you are.
Clark Dean: I think it's a learning experience. Obviously, three of us have never been here before. The one who has came through trials. You know, we haven't been in camp boats before at the Olympics, or at the Olympics in general. You learn a lot.
Andrew Reed: We work really hard; we don't have a full-on professional program, but we train hard, we work well together, and we only found each other as a four in late May or early June.
I think we made big, big strides coming together as a unit, and it was just really fast conditions out there. The caliber of rowing, we just didn't have it today, but I'm really proud of the racing we did to get to this point, and I thought we had a really good process going through it.
row2k: To come here, show up, and challenge for the lead in the heat, is hard without a lot of time racing together. How do you make that happen?
Reed: I think you've got to trust the other guys in the boat. We all earned our position in this boat, we all had a lot of respect and trust between each other. We all knew our roles. When we committed to going, we went together.
It's not a sport where one guy can be a hero. You've got to do it together.
Dean: Trust the guys in your boat. Hopefully trust your equipment. I'm not going to make excuses, but we've had problems with our equipment before. We had a problem with our equipment today.
I think having faith in yourself, in your equipment, doing stuff that doesn't break all the time, not taking risks, just rolling the dice which is kind of what we did today. I guess it just didn't go out in our favor. You know, we were hoping for a better performance, but it is what it is.
row2k: How do you roll with stuff like that when it comes down?
Dean: I don't really. I'm pretty upset, actually. We had equipment break, and we lost because of it. I'm not saying we were going to win, but we would have done better. I don't think I do handle it well. It's upsetting. It's a lot of time, I don't know if I'd say wasted, because I learned a lot, but it's a lot of time down the drain for no hardware for what ended up being a really trivial thing going wrong.
row2k: What was it?
Dean: We've had trouble with our skeg before. We have a different kind of skeg that no one really uses. This is I think the third time in about 20 rows that it's broken and gone faulty on us. It just happened to be today where it breaks again. I mean, a lot of that time, I was really trusting it.
I don't know why. We just were okay rolling the dice and hoping it wouldn't go wrong. It didn't go wrong in the heat. We beat the Romanians then. We're in the pack and had a great race. I think we just doubled down on it, and it didn't work out in our favor.
You can watch the video. We were on the buoys the whole time, and there was nothing I could do; my toe was to starboard the whole time. You know, we were on the backfoot with an arm high behind our back. It's not an excuse. The equipment, it's all our wheelhouse. We have to own our boat.
row2k: That is tough. Outside of the equipment issue, can you talk about your approach?
Dean: I think managing expectations and staying calm is critical - knowing your place, knowing who you're going to be fighting, and what you're fighting for. And then using energy when you have to. And when you're not using energy, conserving - staying off your feet, trusting each other, staying on the same page. We had a boat meeting every day we were here. We were focused. We were zoned in. We knew what we had to do. We couldn't do it, but I think we got a lot of things right.
Reed: We had a good plan going into the race. There was a ton of visualization of how we wanted to race our race, how we could get from Point A to B as quickly as we possibly could. We knew our strengths, we knew our weaknesses, we had a plan to try and mitigate those weaknesses. Generally, that second 500 was a point of vulnerability, but things today didn't quite go our way, but I think we had a really good process. I had a lot of belief in what we did and what we were trying to do.
Dean: I think we handled it well. We have good teammates, and we've been doing close racing. It's not like we're an undefeated boat within the training center. There are great guys who are pushing us all the time. We're used to having to race. You know, the venue is different, the conditions are different, rowing with buoys is different, but racing is racing, and I think that's one of our strengths.
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