After yet another short and brutish morning of Final Three racing, I still believe it: outside of weight-class boxing and similar combat sports, there may be nothing so stark and merciless in all of sport as these death matches in the oft-considered to be gentile sport of rowing. For rowing insiders, the fact that the combatants have already raced so many times in the past week, and thus come into the final race almost entirely stripped bare of any mystery or unused tactics, makes it all the more harrowing and riveting. This morning did not disappoint in this regard.
In the women’s single, Gevvie Stone seemed to be very much back on form in the early going, pushing out to an open water lead in the first third of the race that almost convinced that yesterday’s effort was a blip in her otherwise successful run at the single this year. But 2008 Olympian and 2009 U23 bronze medalist Lindsay Meyer soon closed water, and then eked back up even, proving that her late charge yesterday was similarly no fluke. For the final 500 meters, the two scullers rowed the same rating, blades going in and out of the water at almost the same time, with Meyer challenging, and Stone defending; it was stunning and almost heart-stopping to watch. With about 100 meters to go, Stone had a slight bobble, and this may have been the boat race, and the trials; Meyer rallied hard in the final five to eight strokes, and won by just under a second.
“I just kept going. It was a really close, amazing race,” Meyer told USRowing. “I just stayed calm and kept pounding it. I don’t know that I ever have a real plan until I get into it. But I usually am not particularly fast off the start. I was just sort of trying to hang in with her on that because I know she is a really good starter. And then I just went for it when I saw the opportunity.”
Similarly, the men’s coxed pair match saw the Final One winner poised to end all doubt early, as Steve Kasprzyk, Troy Kepper, and coxswain Marcus McElhenney blasted out to an open water lead big enough that, had it broken Steve Young, Nareg Guregian, and Justin Stangel , no one would have faulted the trailing crew.
But it didn’t go that way, and Young/Guregian/Stangel clawed relentlessly back into the running, and then unleashed the same deadly sprint they used yesterday. The parallels to yesterday’s race were uncanny and almost grotesque; the same calls at the same places in the same crews, leading to the same result. It almost seemed like a purgatory of sorts, where the participants were doomed to repeat the same fate over and over. As many rowers know, certainly races like this do live on in memory in just that way.
“We knew from the race before that we had the sprint if we needed it,” Young told USRowing. “We started out a little farther down today than we had hoped, but I told them with 500 meters to go, I said ‘you’ve got 500 meters to go and a length to go. If you want it, it’s yours.’ They definitely wanted it. It was a great finish.”
Finally, Julia Nichols returned to Mercer Lake to clean up the detritus of the women’s lightweight sculling circus this morning, and did so with class and poise. That she even had to show up this morning speaks directly to the scorched earth mentality so many have had for so long toward the politics, rules, laws, and nuts and bolts of selection of our teams; hopefully some day we will have the wherewithal to have all of this make sense. Good for Julia for showing up and putting in a nice row at least to do herself proud; across the finish line, she paused briefly and then kept going down into the narrow reaches of the lake, warming down and getting on with the final weeks of prep ahead.
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10/03/2010 4:00:43 AM
10/02/2010 6:07:58 PM