The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 14
Later that afternoon, the boys finally arrived at what would be their home for the next several weeks, a police cadet training academy in Köpenick, a quaint village a few miles away from the Olympic rowing course. Unlike most of the ancient buildings in town, the police academy was modern looking—all glass, steel, and concrete. Most of the cadets had been moved out to make room for the American oarsmen and others. Unfortunately, even though the building was brand-new, it was cold and there were no hot showers.
The U.S. Olympic team arrives in Berlin.
The next morning, the boys awoke early, eager to get out on the water. After breakfast a gray German army bus transported them three miles down the Langer See to the racecourse in Grünau. When they arrived, the boys discovered that they were going to share a shell house with the German crew—a fine new brick and stucco building called Haus West. Over the entrance, an American flag and a Nazi flag faced each other. The German oarsmen were courteous but hardly gushing with enthusiasm to meet the boys from Washington. They seemed to be a bit older, and they were exceptionally fit and disciplined. They were almost military in the way they carried themselves.
When the boys finally took to the water, the results were spectacularly disappointing. Their timing was all off. Their pulls were weak and inefficient. The Canadian and Australian crews, practicing sprints, blew past them with smirks on their faces. Ulbrickson had never seen them row so poorly. The boys had gained a lot of weight and almost all of them had colds. Don Hume’s seemed to be getting worse, and the chilling winds on the Langer See and cold, drafty police barracks hardly helped.
Over the next few days, the boys fell into a routine: rowing badly in the morning and then heading into Berlin for the afternoon. They took in shows, visited tourist sites, and bought bratwurst sausages from street vendors. Over and over again, ordinary Germans greeted them by extending their right hands palms down and shouting, “Heil Hitler!” The boys took to responding by extending their own hands and saluting their own leader, President Roosevelt. They’d shout, “Heil Roosevelt!” The Germans, for the most part, pretended not to notice.
But those afternoon jaunts weren’t enough to improve the crew’s morale. They were still rowing terribly. Gordy Adam and Don Hume were still sick. By July 29, Hume was too ill to row. Too ill, in fact, to get out of bed. Ulbrickson put Don Coy, a substitute who had made the trip, in at the critical stroke position. But when they practiced with Coy in the stroke seat, the boat just didn’t feel right.
Ulbrickson was deeply concerned now. As crews from other nations arrived at Grünau, he and Pocock were spending a lot of time down by the water, studying the competition. The Germans had to be taken very seriously. The Italians also looked like a threat. They had lost to California in the 1932 Olympics by only two-tenths of a second. Now four of the rowers from that boat were back for another chance. The Japanese crew, from Tokyo Imperial University, rowed in a small shell, with short oars and small blades, and they averaged just 145 pounds per oarsman. But they could accelerate at an astonishing rate. The Australians did not boast the best technique, but they had fire and strength.
Above all, though, Pocock and Ulbrickson believed the British were the boat to beat. Rowing was traditionally a British sport, and the oarsmen and coxswain that Britain had sent to the 1936 Olympics were the best of the British best. William George Ranald Mundell Laurie, also known as Ran, was perhaps the best British stroke of his generation. He was 188 pounds of power, grace, and keen intelligence. Along with coxswain John Noel Duckworth, a small man with great heart, Laurie had piloted his crew to three major victories in a row. In the famed Boat Race on the Thames River in London, they’d already raced and won in front of a half million to a million fans. To Ulbrickson, that experience alone had to give the British boys an edge.
What most concerned Ulbrickson about the British boys, though, was their strategy. They liked to do exactly what the Washington boys did so well. They excelled at sitting back but staying close, rowing hard but slow, then mowing down their opponents in the end. Duckworth operated an awful lot like Bobby Moch. And Ran Laurie handled the stroke oar an awful lot like Don Hume. It was going to be interesting to see what happened when two crews playing the same game met on the Langer See.
The 1936 games opened officially on August 1, in a spectacular ceremony at the Olympic Stadium, but the rowing competition would not begin until August 12. As the boys waited, the weather on the Langer See turned positively wintry. A cold, cutting wind blew down the racecourse. The boys rowed in sweatshirts, their legs slathered in goose grease to protect them from the chill. The preliminary heats were less than two weeks away, but they still hadn’t regained their form. Their timing was off. They caught crabs. They were out of shape, and Don Hume wasn’t getting any healthier. Since he’d first gotten sick at Princeton, he had never really stopped coughing and dragging around. Unless he got healthy, Ulbrickson figured they would not have a chance. And then there was the matter of the racecourse. Ulbrickson was not happy with how it had been laid out. There were six lanes. If there was a strong wind on race day, the two outermost lanes would be so exposed that the crews stuck there would have a much harder row. Lanes one through four, on the other hand, stuck close to the southern shore of the lake. They were protected from the wind through most of the course. The crews assigned to these lanes would basically have a two-length advantage over the boats on the outside. Ulbrickson wanted the outer lanes eliminated, but German Olympic officials rejected the idea.
As the heats approached, Ulbrickson grounded the boys. There would be no more trips into Berlin or anywhere else. The boys began to get tense and fidgety again. Nerves began to grow raw among the other crews as well. The Aussies made no effort to conceal their contempt for the Brits. The Brits could not even look at the Germans. They remembered fighting them in the last war, and they were worried a second one was coming soon.
At lunchtime one day, the tensions erupted. The different crews ate together, and it had become a tradition for them to sing national songs during meals. When it came time for the Yugoslavian crew to rise and sing, they launched into an odd rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” There was something about the way they sang that Chuck Day did not appreciate. He was convinced they were insulting the United States of America. And he would not stand for that.
Day bolted out of his seat and plowed into the Yugoslavians, fists flying. Bobby Moch charged right in behind him, going for the biggest man on the crew. Right behind Moch came the rest of the Washington boys, and behind them, just for the fun of it, the entire Australian team. The German crew rushed to the side of the Yugoslavians. Boys shoved other boys. They threw chairs and hurled insults. A few more fists flew. Everyone was yelling, but because of all the different languages, nobody could understand what anybody else was saying. Finally the Dutch national crew dove in and settled everyone down.
In the last few days before the first preliminary heat the American boys worked on centering and calming themselves. None of them wanted to waste his chance at a gold medal. And none wanted to waste it for the others. All along Joe Rantz had figured he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last. He had often struggled to master the technical side of the sport. But what Joe didn’t know was that every boy in the boat felt exactly the same way. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in the boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and that he might fail the others at any moment. None of them wanted to let that happen.
The boys began to draw even closer together. They took to huddling on the float before and after workouts, talking about what, precisely, they could do to improve. They draped arms over one another’s shoulders and talked through their race plan, speaking softly but with increasing confidence. They looked one another in the eye, speaking earnestly. They quoted Pocock to one another. They walked the shores of the lake, skipping stones, but the jokes and horseplay were gone now. They began to grow serious in a way they had never been before. Hume returned to the boat, and everything began to feel right again. They began to find their swing.
Left to right: Joe Rantz, Stub McMillin, Bobby Moch, Chuck Day, Shorty Hunt.
They were back. All they needed now, Pocock told them on August 10, was a little competition. And they were about to get it.
View from the grandstands at Grünau.
25
A Game of Cat and Mouse
There were fourteen eight-oared crews, and each would have two chances to make it into the race for the gold on August 14. If a given crew won its preliminary race on August 12, it would earn a spot in the medal round automatically. Each of the losing crews would race again on August 13 and would need to win that heat to advance to the final on the following day. For their preliminary race, the boys from Washington were assigned to row against France, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and the crew they were most concerned about, Great Britain.
Now that the boat was performing well, Ulbrickson backed off the training and told the boys to rest. This did little to help Don Hume, though. By race day, he was ill again. He had lost a total of fourteen pounds. His six-foot-two frame was down to skin and bones. His chest was still congested, and he was running a fever on and off. But he insisted he was ready to row. On the day of the preliminary, he stayed in bed until late afternoon, when the boys boarded the bus for the racecourse.
Conditions were almost ideal for rowing. The skies were lightly overcast, but the temperatures were in the low seventies. Only a hint of wind out on the Langer See ruffled the slate-gray water. The boys had been assigned to row in lane one, the most protected from what little wind there was. By the time Joe and the boys paddled to the starting line, some twenty-five thousand people had entered the regatta grounds. The boys backed the Husky Clipper into position and waited. Right next door, in lane two, Ran Laurie, Noel Duckworth, and the rest of the British crew did the same. Duckworth nodded at Bobby Moch, and Moch returned the gesture.
The race started, and the American boys got away badly again. Someone in the middle of the boat missed the water on the first or second stroke. In lane four the Japanese fluttered rapidly into the lead, whipping at the water. Noel Duckworth and Ran Laurie took the British boat out hard but then eased up and settled into second place behind the Japanese. The United States was dead last. Once they got going, Moch and Hume kept the stroke rate high until they passed the Czechs. Then they eased up too. The Japanese stretched their lead over the British to a full length. But neither Moch nor Duckworth was thinking about the Japanese. They were thinking about each other. And until the halfway point they held their positions.
The exhausted Japanese suddenly began to fade, along with the Czechs. So did the French. That left the Americans and the Brits right where they had expected to be, alone with each other at the front of the pack. Now it was a game of cat and mouse.
Moch told Hume to edge the rate up slightly, to see what would happen. Hume kicked it up to thirty-six. The U.S. boat crept to within a half length of the British boat’s stern. Duckworth glanced over his shoulder. He and Laurie picked up the pace. The British boat held its lead. The boys in both boats could now hear the roar of the crowd in the grandstands. The coxswains could see the finish line up ahead. But neither was ready to make his move yet. Both were holding back.
Finally, with 250 meters to go, Moch shouted, “Now, boys. Now! Give me ten!” The boys dug hard. The American flag snapping at the front of the Husky Clipper began to move past Duckworth, creeping halfway up the length of the British boat. For a moment, they held their position, the white blades of the U.S. shell flashing furiously alongside the crimson blades of the British. Then Moch yelped at Hume to up the rate again, and the Clipper resumed advancing.
The British remained out front by half a length with 150 meters to go. But the American boys had found their swing and they were holding on to it. They were rowing as hard as they had ever rowed, taking huge sweeping cuts at the water, over and over again, rocking into the beat as if they were forged together. Every muscle, tendon, and ligament in their bodies was burning with pain. But they were rowing in perfect, flawless harmony. Nothing was going to stop them. In the last twenty strokes, they simply powered past the British boat. The American fans in the stands rose and cheered as the bow of the Husky Clipper knifed across the line a full twenty feet ahead of the British shell. A moment later, Don Hume pitched forward and collapsed across his oar.
It took Moch a full minute of splashing water on Hume’s face before Hume was able to sit upright again and help paddle the shell over to the float. When they got there, though, the boys got sweet news. Their time, 6:00.8, was a new Olympic and world record. Ulbrickson crouched down next to the boat and quietly said, “Well done, boys.”
As the boys tucked into their dinners that night at the police academy in Köpenick, they were jubilant. The British would have to row and win the next day to make the finals, but the Americans would have a day off. Al Ulbrickson, though, remained deeply concerned. After dinner he ordered Don Hume back to his sickbed. The boy looked like death. Whatever he had, it was clearly more than a cold. Now Ulbrickson had to figure out who was going to stroke the boat when they raced again in two days.
After the qualifying race.
After lunch the next day, the boys wandered through town, joking, poking into shops, taking pictures, buying a few souvenirs, exploring corners of Köpenick they hadn’t yet seen. Like most of the Americans in Berlin that summer, they had concluded that the new Germany was a pretty nice place. It was clean, the people were friendly, everything worked neatly and efficiently, and the girls were pretty.
But there was a Germany the boys could not see, a Germany that was hidden from them. Three years earlier, the waters of the Langer See had been reddened with blood. In 1933, Nazi soldiers rounded up hundreds of Köpenick’s Jews, Catholics, and others, tortured ninety-one of them to death, then dumped their bodies into the river Spree and the Langer See. And even as the boys explored the town, to the north of Berlin the Germans were already constructing a sprawling concentration camp. Tens of thousands of prisoners would soon die there.
As the boys walked the streets that afternoon, they did not know that many of the locals they passed were doomed. People who waited on them in shops. Old women strolling around the grounds of Köpenick’s castle. Mothers pushing baby carriages on cobblestone streets. Children shrieking gleefully on playgrounds. Old men walking dogs. Before long, many of them would be shipped off on trains, sent to their deaths. During the Olympics, though, the brutal reality of Nazi Germany was nearly invisible. To the athletes, Köpenick seemed to be about as pleasant and peaceful as anything back home in Washington.
That evening the boys went down to the course to watch the next set of races, the heats that would determine the final lineup for the medal race. Hungary and Switzerland were already through, and now Germany, Italy, and Great Britain each won their races. The boys finally knew who they were going to have to beat to win gold. The one remaining question was which lane they’d be assigned to, and when Al Ulbrickson found out, he was furious. Normally, the team with the top time earned the most favorable lane. So Ulbrickson figured his boys would be rowing in lane one, which was protected from the wind. Instead, the German Olympic Committee changed the rules for the finals. The Germans were given the best lane. Italy was in lane two and Switzerland in lane three. Hungary had lane four. Great Britain was in lane five. And the United States was all the way out in lane six.
The protected lanes went to the host country and her closest ally. The worst lanes went to her potential enemies, Great Britain and the United States. It was deeply suspicious, and just what Ulbrickson had feared since first seeing the course. If there was any kind of headwind the next day, his boys were going to have to make up as much as two boat lengths just to get even with the field.
The weather did not seem willing to cooperate. The next morning a cold, steady rain was falling in Grünau, and a blustery wind was whipping down the racecourse. At the police academy in Köpenick, the jubilation had evaporated. Don Hume was still in bed, his fever spiking once again, and Al Ulbrickson had decided he could not row. Don Coy, the substitute, would have to step into the shell again at the stroke position. Ulbrickson broke the news to Hume, then to the others.
Ulbrickson’s final advice.
At the breakfast table, the boys ate scrambled eggs and steak, sitting silently, their eyes seeing nothing and no one. This was the day that they had worked for all year. In fact, most had worked for three years to get here. Now it had all come down to one final race, and they were not going to be together. They began to talk it over, and the more they talked, the more certain they were. It just wasn’t right. Hume had to be there with them. They weren’t just nine guys in a boat. They were a single thing, a crew. They got up and went to Ulbrickson. Stub McMillin was the team captain now, so he cleared his throat and nervously stepped forward. Hume was absolutely vital to the rhythm of the boat, he told his coach. Nobody else could respond as quickly and smoothly to the moment-by-moment adjustments that a crew had to make during a race. Bobby Moch piped up. He just had to have Hume sitting in front of him, responding to his calls, setting the pace. He and Hume could almost read each other’s minds. Then Joe stepped forward: “If you put him in the boat, Coach, we will pull him across the line. Just strap him in. He can just go along for the ride.”
Outside, a German army bus was waiting to take them down to Grünau for the medal race. Ulbrickson told them to go get their gear. The boys began to troop upstairs. After a long few moments, Ulbrickson shouted up the stairwell after them, “And bring Hume along with you!”
