“Honestly, I’ve heard reports that rowing’s quite boring,” said Hannah Scott, after the women’s quadruple sculls had staged the latest of late shows to pip the Dutch crew to gold. “We just thought we would give everyone a show.”
As the two leading boats crossed the line, the margin was too close to call, with PF – for “photo finish” – flashing up on the big screen. But Scott, who occupies the second seat of this remarkable crew, said the result had never been in doubt to her.
More than that, in fact: Scott said she had called it with 100 metres to go, which was more than anyone watching did. Her faith was rewarded in a victory margin of around a foot and a half, or 0.15 seconds.
How rare is this in rowing? Graeme Thomas, who had finished fourth in the men’s quad some 10 minutes earlier, immediately mentioned the virtual dead-heat in Rio in the men’s single sculls. That was the race in which New Zealand’s Mahe Drysdale was eventually awarded gold over Croatia’s Damir Martin, despite recording the same time to the nearest 100th of a second.
But it’s safe to say that this was the closest Olympic finish for eight years – as well as the first British gold in the same period. What a way to officially reopen Great Britain’s long-lost rowing gold-mine.
The late surge from Scott and company, which saw them power through the water like a 40-foot shark, had every spectator catching their breath. Even Princess Anne, presenting the medals, told the athletes that the finish had been “a bit close for my liking”.
Here was a bitter blow for the Dutch crew, which had led a two-horse race for 1,999 of the 2,000 metres. Afterwards, their stroke Tessa Dullemans had to sit down in the mixed zone, clearly struggling with nausea in the humid conditions as she clutched an ice towel to her neck. In a gracious but regretful interview, Dullemans’s team-mate Roos de Jong explained that “We already knew from last year that they [the British] had a really, really strong finish. So I was a little bit scared. I felt them coming.”
Is it possible for a crew to time their final stroke so as to engineer that tiny boost, like a sprinter dipping at the tape? De Jong shook her head. “Maybe when you’re by yourself in a single, you can decide when to push your blade in, but in a four it doesn’t work. Anyway, you have no idea where the finish is. You just keep going until you hear something.”
Just over six minutes before that tumultuous finish, the Dutch had flown out of the starting blocks. The British took the opposite path. Coming up to the 200-metre mark, they were still in last position. But they didn’t panic. They have a diesel-engine approach: low cadence, high power, delayed impact. And they had been here before. At last year’s world championships, they had produced another of their trademark strong finishes to overtake the Dutch and claim victory by 0.67 seconds.
The margin at the kilometre mark was a little over a second, which equates to around half a length. Even as the finish line neared, the Dutch seemed to hold their advantage. Only as the buoys turned red, to mark the final 250 metres, did the British shark begin to show its teeth.
“We’ve come back from quite a long way before,” said Lola Anderson, the woman in the No 3 seat. “It’s not over until you’ve crossed the finish line. And the moment we lose that belief, we’ve lost the race. So we will always stay, no matter how far we are behind.”
According to Scott, “Everyone always wants to win as convincingly as possible. But there’s never any strict plan. Racing is always going to be fluid. It’s always going to be dynamic. And part of what makes everyone here in this event Olympic standard is the fact they know how to move with a race. You’ve always got a chance to claw your way back. And that’s what we have as a crew. We have an unrelenting, united trust in the fact that if we commit, we can move. and that’s what we did.
“A hundred metres from the line,” Scott added, “I said ‘We have got this’. And then we just came through. It was just keeping tunnel vision, all these girls. We just trust ourselves.”
In the aftermath, the quietest of the four was the woman in the stroke seat. Georgie Brayshaw kept staring into space, like the survivor of some harrowing near-miss. And it would indeed have been a harrowing near-miss for this world-champion crew, had Brayshaw not calibrated her final approach so perfectly that she could have been an airline pilot.
“I just had belief in what they were telling me, behind me,” said Brayshaw. “They told me that ‘We can do this’ and I just trust them so much.
“I’ve got rubbish answers,” added Brayshaw apologetically. “I just don’t know what to say.” Never mind. She will never come up with a better response than the one she had just delivered to the Dutch.
