Anne Marden
Olympic Rowing

Interviewer: Carrie Kline and Michael Kline
Date: July 11, 2016
Place of Interview: Fowler Branch Library, West Concord, Mass.
Transcriptionist: Kim Janoff, Adept Word Management, Houston, Tex.

Click here for pt. 1 of audio. -- Click here for pt. 2 of audio.
Audio files are in .mp3 format.

Introduction and History of Painting of a Boat at Sea

Carrie Kline
Okay, so today is July 11, 2016. I'm Carrie Kline, here with Michael Kline, and would you say, "My name is," and introduce yourself.

Anne Marden
My name is Anne Marden and I'm a native of Concord, Massachusetts.

CK
Great. And your date of birth for some perspective.

AM
My date of birth the 12th of June, 1958.

CK
Well, why don't you start by telling us about your people and where you were raised.

AM
Well I've finally learned my family history over the recent years, and my father's forefather—or people actually were part of the family that organized and sailed on the Mayflower. I never knew that when I was a kid. I found that out because of a painting my parents gave me. I looked up the history of the painting and my great-great—I think great-great-great-grandfather ran away to sea when he was a little boy and ended up becoming a clipper ship captain in the 1800s. And his name was Captain Skiddy and he had been orphaned as a boy and he was originally a Taylor—and that's where the Taylor family from the Mayflower—and he became a Skiddy and took his new family's—his mother remarried and he took his new father's name, so he became a Skiddy.

CK
S-k—

AM
0:01:32.5 I-d-d-y. And Captain Skiddy's—well—going to the rowing—after all my rowing was over, I became invited to be in the Hall of Fame for Rowing. The Hall of Fame for Rowing was held at the Mystic Seaport. And I had received the painting from my parents, and it was a painting of a boat at sea, painted by a French watercolor painter. I'm going to forget the guy's name. In the 1800s, watercolors were—boats were painted for insurance purposes. There were no cameras. And so they would do a sketch of the boat and they would write assurance. That means insurance in French.

And it was the Rue brothers of Marseilles. They were the ones who were really doing it. There's a big family of Rue brothers. There are lots of brothers, uncles, and everything like that and they were all doing this. But every once in a while they painted a serious painting of a ship at sea. And this is the painting of a ship at sea my parents gave me, and my sister Betsy told me it was worth a lot of money, because it was a Rue. So, we took it to an evaluation agent and they said, "Oh, it's got a lot of mildew. It's probably worth about $5,000." My sister thought, "Oh, that's terrible." I thought, "Great. My parents gave this to me and I don't want the rest of my family members thinking I took a—ran away with something that was worth a lot of money."

Anyway, I can restore it. So, I took it—I live in England and I took it to Norwich, where they—the boat-building center of England and I found boat—a painting restorer there would know about boat paintings. And he said—he said the boat—the painting was in good shape, he would reframe it, and then I should look up the history of the boat—of the painting and I should write up a history of the painting and put it—and tape it to the back of the painting, so that if I gave it to my children or gave it away to someone, they would know the history of the painting. And so, I tried to find out what the painting was a boat—was of. And finally, my sister—my sister who knows everything, she said it was a Rue painting, where the Rue brother who painted it, instead of painting the ship for assurance, painted the boat at sea, only he never went to sea. So where did he get his sketch? It's because the captains in those days had to know how to draw maps, because they were—they made money as captains by driving the boat—steering the boat, with its load of goods, to—from—you know—A to B, but also chartering—chartering place—you know—drawing maps. They were surveyors. They would draw maps. They would earn money that way too. And when you—once you just start drawing maps in the 1800s, you also become very good at drawing. And he drew pictures of boats at sea, when he was at sea—you know—real life from a storm. And then he would sell the picture to the Rue brothers, who would do a painting.

So, I never knew that when I was a kid growing up. I didn't really care about that stuff. But now—but after everything that happened to my family and they gave me the painting, well I wanted to know. So, now I know about the Taylor family and the Cushmans and the Mayflower. And now my sister who knows everything, said, "Yeah, and they—those Taylors, the—you know—there was some dark side of them as well." And Aunt Alice told—Aunt Alice told my sister Betsy that the Taylors you had to watch out for. So!

CK
0:04:40.9 And that's Taylor, like a suit of clothes—T-a-i—

AM
No, no. T-a-y-l-o-r.

CK
T-a-y—okay.

AM
It's just the family that—you know—who—that related very closely with organizing the Mayflower and some of them sailed on it—the Cushmans and the Taylors. I found this out because I was researching this painting. Some of the other people must know that as well. But we didn't—we only recently—I only recently found out anything about this, including that Skiddy was actually a Taylor in the beginning. So anyway, that—that was part of my history, so I wanted to get that out on the table.

CK
Yeah. Well, move us through—through the ages to get to you then (laughing).

Concord-Carlisle High School and Phillips Exeter Academy

AM
(Laughing.) So—yeah, so boating is obviously in our history and —and on my father's mother's side as well and I won't go into that. But, when I went to—when I grew up here in Concord, I didn't really—I wasn't on the school field hockey team or anything like that, or the basketball team. We had teams at school. I didn't really like organized sports, but I did—I did hiking, and skiing—downhill skiing at Sugarloaf, things like that I really liked. And we had a donkey and some ponies. So, when I was a sophomore at Concord-Carlisle High School, I was very—I was—I misbehaved a lot and I got in trouble at gym. I actually flunked gym. And the gym teacher one day told me that I had done something wrong and I had to run in circles around—inside the gym. This was in the—one of the old gym buildings near—what used to be the Emerson? Near the library, near the Concord Library. They had—they had an—at least have a gym there. I don't think they have that there anymore. It was in there and we—and I—the told me I had to run around and around the edge of the gym—the whole gym section. The lady thought that would be punishment for me. Wow! I never knew I could run, but I could run great. You know, I loved it. It was great. And, so I remember that as thinking, "Gosh, you know, it doesn't make any sense. She's punishing me for something that I actually—wow, I really like this."

And then after that, I—my parents realized that I—well, my parents wanted me to get—to have the best education I could and they saw that I was just —they saw people I was friends with at school, where—you know—we used to hitchhike into Harvard Square instead of go to classes, things like that. They thought I'd be better off if they sort of changed my environment, so off I went to Phillips Exeter Academy. And we had to do sports there, and so I took aquatics when I first got there. It was that—like—it wasn't varsity swimming; it wasn't junior varsity swimming; it wasn't club swimming; it was—you know—the fourth level down swimming in the old pool. They had two pools. They had a new pool and they had an old pool. The old pool was where the character in A Separate Peace beat the school record.

CK
0:07:34.6 A character in?

AM
A Separate Peace by Jonathan Knowles. We read that when we went to Exeter, of course. And I'm not sure I had read the book yet, but I was in that pool. And I was a smoker, and the teacher said that we had—one of the things that we did was, we played games and everything, but we never had to swim laps. Because look, they had kid who didn't want to go to gym. And one day they had us do this exercise where you had to—a weight at the bottom of the pool—like halfway down the pool. You'd go—dive down, swim under water, pick up the weight, dive back, and gradually put the weight further and further and further and further, until it was at the very end of the deep end of the pool. And I was the only one who could swim over there, pick it up, and swim back. And I got out and the teacher said, "Oh, we know who the smokers are in this room." "You do? No, no you don't."

So, then I decided I would try rowing, because we had to do spring sports, because I started Exeter in January. And it was a boarding school and you were supposed to learn to get to know all the students there and everything. And within weeks of joining the school, I had—all my friends were outside. They were all the kids who hung out. That was what I was like. And so, then I—in the spring, you had to do a sport and you could choose different sports. And I really didn't like the idea of wearing a uniform and being in sort of an organized team format and everything like that. So I thought, "I'll try rowing. You go out on the barge." Also, rowing actually was on a tidal river, so some days you couldn't row in the afternoons. You'd get an afternoon off or you—or you'd have to row early in the morning. But the novices didn't really row early in the morning. So I thought, "Oh, I'll try that." And I just never really—I loved it. I never looked back after that and started training and, went to the Olympics. So that's the story.

CK
What grabbed you about this, about rowing?

AM
Well, actually that's the thing about Concord. There's a lot of people in Concord who are—who are into books and also into boats. And —you know I think about my family history, which I didn't know anything about at the time, and it makes me kind of wonder. But I really liked being out—you know—I was doing hiking. I'd actually done a lot of hiking with a family from Concord. And —

CK
With your family?

AM
Well, with my dad and my mom. They took us hiking when were kids. We would like climb Mount Monadnock. And then when we started skiing at Sugarloaf, we would climb Bigelow Mountain. But I got to be friends with a lady named Jessica Stern, who's from the Town of Concord, and her father was, I think, lives in Cambridge now. But he used to hike a lot and I got to know Jessica. And her father would allow me to come with Jessica and we would do Mount—climb in the White Mountains, when I was around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. And we used to go almost every weekend. And I loved being outdoors and I loved the hiking. And I would go with Jessica and myself and her—her stepbrother and maybe one of the stepbrother friends, the Fitches. And we would go on these long hikes. And after a bit of chitchat in the beginning, we would go for like three hours and nobody would say a word, because we were just like—we were—we knew each other. We just walked. I loved that. And rowing kind of—that's the one thing that continued that—I mean it continued that thing I started with hiking in the White Mountains. It was—and I—Yeah, I haven't really done any White Mountain hiking since, but that was wonderful. I mean that's what really brought me out of all this hanging out with the other—with the bad crowd was this hiking, you know. And rowing just built on that. And I really loved rowing.

CK
0:11:18.3 Has it—so, you were—you loved being quiet like that, in nature, just moving through the quiet?

The Rowing Team

AM
Well, sometimes yeah. But it wasn't so totally like that. I mean let's say we were going down, after we had gone up. I mean especially George Fitch, Doug Plummer, and myself, we used to race down the mountain. We used—and you know—we used to—it would be—we would compete and everything like that. Sometimes we would compete; sometimes we wouldn't. Sometimes we'd go fast; sometimes we'd go slow. So, there was a lot of—you know—intensity as well, as well as—you know—sereneness at times. You know, it varied. And then a lot of the times, it was when you were going up. Your heart rate's up, you're sweating, and you're just marching along and everything. I loved that part of it as well. And all of that you see in rowing.
You know, you're working really, really hard sometimes. Sometimes you're paddling.

But for me, also, I—you know—I am actually quite competitive, when it gets down to it, and I love the competition as well. And after my—after my first year at Exeter, which was that first term where I did the aquatics and then I did sort of introductory rowing. After that, I was on—I was on the team after that. And the next two years, it was all about me being on the rowing team. I pulled my grades up a lot. Got me into—I was able to apply to lots of different universities. I got into Princeton University.

And I'm really proud of my high school team. We were the second class at my high school that actually had girls rowing. This was at Phillips Exeter. And even though we had—like the boys had a proper locker room, where they had showers and hooks and lockers and nice—lots of wood, paneled and everything like that. We just had—the janitor's bathroom and cupboard was turned into our station. And—the janitor—he was really the boatman. He became one of my—he—I really liked him. We got on really, really, really well. And he didn't—he didn't mind giving the girls his little room. But it was really tiny. And that's where we got to change and everything. Well, we could change back in the dorms.

CK
0:13:22.1 His name?

AM
Chan Sandler. And, I still have pictures of myself at graduation where I had a picture taken with him. And I think—you know—he went—he goes back to the academy a long time and he used to like take the toboggan with food on it around during the Depression to make sure all the kids got food and everything and—or during—during the war—during —I think it was probably more the war for —during the war when there was rationing. But we—we didn't necessarily have the best coaches either or the best boats. But we loved what we were doing and we were really keen to do it. We really tried hard.

And when I—when I went off to Princeton, I was on a very strong team, where we had three freshmen in the first boat, two older ladies who—older classes, like Sophomore or Junior, who just started to row that year; and three returning varsity from the prior year. So, all these novices and we were—you know—the varsity boat. And we came third in the eastern sprints. And that year—that would have been 1977—the spring of 1977. That was my—I was finishing my freshman year at Princeton. So,we were third in the eastern sprints. We beat Wisconsin, who was stroked by Carrie Graves, who had won a medal—a bronze medal in the 1976 Olympic Games. And the Radcliff crew beat us and the seven seat in the Radcliff crew was my seven seat from Exeter, Martha Newman. So she had made her mark on rowing as well. So it was really, really exciting days. And like I say, we didn't have the best coaches or the best boats. We did get a brand new boat that year at Princeton, and we named the boat—well, I didn't get it. But we—they—everybody decided they'd like to name the boat. They'd like to name it the J'ai Faim. And I was a freshman and I was as hungry as could be, but I didn't equate myself. I didn't—I didn't see that in myself. I just thought I was a normal person. So, I didn't understand why we called the boat the J'ai Faim.

CK
Spelled?

AM
J'ai Faim—f-a-i-m. That means, "I'm hungry," in French. I didn't—I just didn't get it. I said, "Why do we have to call it the J'ai Faim?" You know, I didn't—it just—because back in those days, we were so hungry, but we didn't even know it, is what I'm trying to say. And it was the Yale girls—ladies. At Princeton, we had locker rooms at the back of the tanks. It wasn't that great. The boys had laundry done. I think the girls—the ladies could have laundry done as well, but you throw your laundry in a pen and it goes in a giant caldron? You know, I'd rather just jog back—I'd just rather just jog or walk back to my dorm and have a shower in the dorm, thank you very much. That wasn't very nice either. But the men had a really big locker room and we didn't. But, the men had to walk back up the hill to the campus. And okay, a lot of the guys had cars. I never had a car. I just walked.

But, it was the women at Yale who had to take a bus ride from New Haven to the boathouse, and train while the men trained. And then after the outing was over, they would sit there totally wet and sweaty and cold in the winter, in the bus, waiting while the Yale men showered. That's why the Yale women protested. You probably heard they took their—they had—okay, it was a female athletic director, but they took their clothes off and everything. And Yale built a new boathouse. We weren't as —we weren't as —okay, we named our boat the J'ai Faim, but we didn't sort of protest like that. And we—

CK
0:17:11.1 Well, tell me more about that. I'm kind of dense, so the J'ai Faim meaning—

AM
"I'm hungry." It means I have hunger. That's French for, "I am hungry."

CK
What kind of hunger are we talking about?

AM
To win; to be the best; to compete on equal terms as the men; to all that kind of stuff. I didn't really think about equal terms to the men. Yeah, they had all these showers and everything and lockers, but that didn't bother me, as long as I knew I could be better than them. And I knew I could, so I didn't really care. That's what it's like to be hungry that way, you know. And we didn't complain about the showers. We would have if we were sitting there cold. I'm sorry. That was—that was—that was a recipe for a women's—you know—protest.

CK
So, you had a leg up on the Yale students, but still certainly not—not a sense of equality.

AM
Well, I have to say that they beat us a lot as well. They were a fantastic—they were—maybe they had even more hunger than we did.

MK
The Yale?

AM
Yale, the Yale crew when I was at Princeton.

CK
So, what does hunger do for you as a rower?

Hunger

AM
Well, to be an Olympic athlete, you—a lot of people think it's kind of sacrifice. I think it's a kind of self-centered kind of being that you become. It's—you have to do every—I mean you're basically focused all the time on making sure you don't miss practice, that you do the best you can in practice that you do all the things you need to do to get—to get where you want to go. And , it means—you know—like going to bed early—I mean and not going to the music concert that you parents want to go, like going to parties —and , I don't think that's totally right. So, I always advise young rowers now to—that a really good way—a really good way to loosen up after a really hard practice is to clean your parents' car, especially if you're driving it to practice. That's a great way—thing to do. Parents will be happy and all this—and you're—you know—you've—you—think about The Karate Kid—you know—wax on, wax off—you know.

0:19:25.2 So, you should try to be a part of your family as best you can, because things become self-centered and it's a really hard balance to—to maintain when—you know—you see families that move their whole family because—you know—one child is really good at diving and everybody else suffers. I mean that didn't happen in my family, but little things do. Like I—like I just always—it was always assumed that all I was going to be doing was training. And that's—and so, you do have to train a lot. But for it to work, you have to want to do it. You have to want to train.

CK
To be hungry to train.

1980 Olympics

AM
Yeah, yeah. If you lose that—you know—then why are you doing it? And you're not going to—it's a—there's a lot of—you know—a lot of people talk about attitude, but —you know—to—like to have the dream and like—every once in a while, you sort of—you think about wow—you know—I'd really like to do something. And sometimes—like for me—like when I got to—when I finished Princeton, I had already been on one Olympic team, the 2080 (sic, 1980) Olympic team, which was a boycott year. And the team—the actual boat I was on, the women's quad, we might have made the final, but we weren't really medal contenders. And so, the fact that there was a boycott didn't really—I mean it was upsetting for me, but I mean it wouldn't—that's not what stood in the way of me—that didn't—that's not what stopped me from getting a medal that year is that I wasn't—I wasn't good enough. And I knew it. So yeah, the boycott was terrible. It was really terrible for the—

MK
The boy—it was a—

AM
Boycott. In 1980, the U.S. didn't compete in the Olympics because of the Afghanistan War. And certain athletes in sports across the Olympic piece—across the Olympic team—all the teams didn't compete. There were some athletes who, it was their only Olympics. It was the only time they were in—holding a position to win a gold medal. So for some people, it was—it was—you know—they had something really big taken away from them. And those are the people who became what we call—they talk about the Ghost Olympics, who never—

CK
They're what?

AM:
0:21:41.9 Ghost Olympians. They never got to go to another Olympics. They—it was—they had other things to do. They were at their peak. I know a lady who actually—she lives in Cambridge, but she coached at—she coaches a high school team at Acton-Boxborough. Her name is Holly Hatton and she was the coxswain of the women's eight in the 1980 Olympics. And she—she—the weight requirement was pretty low for coxswains at the time. And if she had stuck with it—if she—you know—had had the money to not work and just do coxing and stuck with it, then a couple years later, maybe she would have still be able to make the weight and maybe she would still be the coxswain of the Olympic team the way the coxswain of the Canadian women's team, Leslie Thompson—she's been coxing the Olympics since 1976.

But Holly, she was big for a coxswain, so she struggled to make the weight. And also, she—you know—she had—she only had herself. She—her—you know—there wasn't anybody supporting her, except herself. She couldn't just keep coxsing and not getting paid—you know—not having a job. So, she knew she had to go to work after this. So, she knew this was her last Olympics and she didn't get to compete. We did select a team and her eight—who, it was coached by a guy named Kris Korzeniowski, who was my—after my second year in—starting my second year in Princeton—

CK
Kris who? I'm sorry.

AM
Kris Korzeniowski. He's a Polish guy.

CK
Can you spell it?

AM
K-o-r-z-e-n-i-o-w-s-k-i. He defected from Poland in the early 1970s and he went to Italy. He coached elder—older—senior men in —in a rowing club in—in Rome. And then he moved to Canada and coached the Canadian Olympic team in 1976. And in 1977 he interviewed and was selected for —and he was appointed Princeton University Women's Rowing Coach—my coach—for the next three years. And Kris—very quickly became head coach of the women's—U.S. Olympic women's team, including the 1980 boat with Holly Hatton in it. And we—I was—I made the quadruple skulls. When we got to the big pre-Olympic competition, which we still competed in, many of the U.S. boats did extremely well. I think the men's eight, the women's eight beat the East Germans, won the gold medal. They felt they were in contention for a gold. And so those people really suffered from the 1980 boycott. Whereas in my situation, I mean I knew I wasn't in the hot boat, so I got over it pretty quickly.

CK
In a hot boat you said?

AM
0:24:18.6 In a hot—you know—in a—in a medal-contender boat. You know when you are and you know when you're not.

CK
Talk about that.

AM
Well, I mean the year before I was in a quad—almost the same quad—and we were —we were very strong—two very strong singles—three very strong single scullers and also some people good at—one person was more excellent in—as like a team player. , but also two of the rowers, Lisa and Liz—Lisa Hanson and Liz O'Leary—Lisa Hanson and Liz Hills, now Lisa Stone and Liz O'Leary. Liz is still coaching at Radcliffe. Lisa Stone—Lisa's now married to Greg Stone and their daughter Gevvie is the medal contender for this upcoming Olympics, Rio. And Gevvie's borrowed my boat in some of the world championships, including the 2012 Olympics.

Back in 1979, Lisa and Liz were the defending national championship champions in the women's double and they lost to another crew in the—in the U.S. trials. So, Lisa and Liz, the top—you know—medal winning at the world championship level. They had won two medal—two bronze medals and they'd won a bronze medal in 1977 in the world championships and also in 1978 in the world championships. The 1978 world championships were held in Karapiro, New Zealand. That was my first world championships. I was stroke of the eight and I was the—I was in the eight and we came in fourth place. I wasn't very happy with our performance. And Kris was—I knew Kris was laughing, because he didn't think we were very good. Kris was a fabulous coach, and he took over the women's eight after that and they got medals and everything, but I wasn't in the boat.

So, in 1979, Lisa and Liz lost the trials to an upcoming double. So Lisa and Liz tried out for the quad and I made the quad with Lisa, Liz, and one other rower named Nancy—her name was Nancy Parsinnen and she was a cross-country skier who had gone to Dartmouth and she was very, very good on distance, even though we were racing only 1,000 meters, which is a very short like race, like three-and-a-half minutes or less. But we had—we had a really good time of it together as a crew and we felt like were—the boat was going really well. And that's the first time I was in a national team crew or felt that we really—we were really good. We could compete with East Germany, Romania, and whoever you throw at—we were—we were going to fight for a medal.

And we went to the—to Yugoslavia for the world championships—what—it was then Yugoslavia. We went to this beautiful lake called Bled, which is now part of Slovak—Slovenia, part of Slovenia is the Dalmatian Coast and this part of it's more Alpine. This is the Alpine part and there's this beautiful lake called Bled. And Nancy at some poisoned—some bad fish, and in those days, she had—they did pp her—they did—gave her IV drop, which is great. I could have used a few IV drips in other incidents. But she got an IV drip, she fully recovered, but in those days, the rules said you couldn't—once you used a spare in a race, you couldn't put the—put the name—put your other rower back in. And with the spare, we were nowhere. I mean it wasn't her fault. She did the best she could. But she didn't—you know. So, we had made the final. We came in fifth and I was really disappointed. And then—but I thought, "Well, the Olympic year—you know—I can—is coming, and I'm good in the single." That fall—the fall of 1979—it was 1978. We didn't compete in the Head of the Charles, this big fall Head race. It means a lot to scullers, because it's a really big deal to row in the Head of the Charles in the single—women's single.

CK
0:28:05.1 What is—I'm sorry. I don't even know what the single means.

Head of the Charles

AM
The Head of the—oh, the single—okay, okay. Because quadruple—quadruple skull is a boat where four people are rowing. Each person has two oars, so it's symmetrical. So, it looks kind of like a water bug—like a really compact water bug. An eight has got eight rowers. Each rower only has one oar, so they're bigger oars. And it's one oar—there's an oar—there's an oar going one direction, then the other direction. So, it's like a—more like a centipede, but it's a centipede all rowing together. It's just that one rower's on the right side and one—and then one rower's on the left side, and then you go down the boat that way. Sometimes you put two rowers together, both on the same side when they—to keep the boat together. Sometimes there's—they have—we call it—we have funny ways of reading boats. But sculling is with two oars; rowing is with one oar. And in—I started off doing rowing in an eight, and then after I went to New Zealand withs stroke of the eight, my coach Kris laughed at me. He said, "Anne, you're too short for row—for making the eight. Why don't you try sculling?" And I—and that's what I—that's what I started doing.

And —but anyway, I started doing sculling in 1978—and I really liked sculling. So, 19—even though I was on the sweep team, which is big oar, in 1978 in New Zealand for the world rowing championships—where Lisa and Liz got the bronze—their second bronze medal—in 1979, I tried out for the quad. Made the quad with Lisa, Liz, and Nancy. Fifth place in the world championships. Then went right into—I think the day after the—after the final, I was out running—five mile run, then six mile run, then seven mile run. Then I was doing all my—then I was back at Princeton training, but I was training for the Head of the Charles in the single, because my coach said I could do the Head of the Charles in the single, instead of one—instead of a big team boat. This is while I was at Princeton. A single is one person, solo in the boat. You are out there—it's like being on that mountain all alone, no—you know—in silence, just going on as hard as you can or—you know—as long as you can. I just loved it. And I rowed the single in the Head of the Charles in 1979. It was my first Head of the Charles in a single. And —

CK
Head of the Charles—

AM
Head of the Charles is a head race. So, a lot of the races for like the world championships, up until 1984, were held over a thousand meters. It takes about three minutes in an eight; three-and-a-half minutes in a—or less in a quad; about three minutes and forty seconds or less, or maybe a little more depending on the wind, in a single. That's a sprint. I mean that's not a distance event. It's like maybe something in between the 800 meters and the 1000—and the 1500 meters for track and field. And in track and field—if you know anything about track and field, there are 800 meters runners who are distance runners who are like 1500—mid-distance runners who—who are sharpening up for something quick or, 400 meter runners who are sprinters, who are going for something a little bit longer—800—you know—less than two minutes.

Rowing in four minutes—I'm only just starting. I mean Head of the—that's what great about the Head of the Charles. It's five miles. So, it's five miles rowing and it's in the single. And I got accepted in the singles entry. There are about twenty-five entries in the women's championship single in the Head of the Charles, and the lineup is based on the prior year, which I hadn't done. So, the winner from the prior year gets to go off first. It's one by one. It's a race against the clock. So, we had a—we had a pretty good team—a pretty good group of scullers in those years and I think—a lot of the top scullers have been on the—okay—the three—three of the top scullers, Lisa Hanson, Liz O'Leary—Liz Hills, and Joan Lind, who was—who was the top sculler of the day. She was the silver medalist from the Montreal Olympics. They hadn't been able to compete in the 1978 Head of the Charles, because we were all in New Zealand. So, everybody who stayed home, including Nancy—in fact, it was Nancy that—Nancy Parsinnen who won the Head of the Charles that—in 1978, so she got to—

CK
Parson?

AM
Parsinnen, who was in my—

CK
Parsining.

AM
Parsinen, P-a-r-s-i-n-e-n (sic). Now her name is Nancy Vespoli, V-e-s-p-o-l-i. Nancy Vespoli's husband, Mike Vespoli, runs the Vespoli Boat Making Company. They make rowing shells. But back then she was Nancy Parsinnen. She had won the Head of the Charles in 1978, so she got to start first. And then somebody must have seated some of the rowers, because some of the—like the top rowers—they weren't going to put them all the way in the end. So, they put like Lisa Hanson, Joan Van—Joan Lind, Lisa Hanson—now, now Stone—Liz O'Leary—Liz Hills, now O'Leary—so on down the line. And then at the very end they put me and then a bunch of club—other scullers. So, I was way in the back, like I was this novice, you know. They put me back there. And I thought, "No. That is a stupid thing to do. I have to pass all these people." And I passed and passed and passed. I kept passing in this race.

You know, it's the Head of the Charles. It starts at the BU boathouse and it goes under some railroad bridges and there's a big sign saying, "Go BU" and stuff like that. And then it goes through the —I guess through two bridges—I can't remember the names. But it's where—it's kind of near the Citgo signs, near the Genzyme building and it's a straightaway. It's 1,000 meter straightaway and you go around past the Riverside Boat Club. And you have these two boat—two arches—two boat—two bridges to go through. And when you come through the two bridges, then you've got the bend where you've got the Weld Boathouse on the right hand—on one side of the river, the Harvard Boathouse on the other, and I think you've got the Weeks Bridge going across.

And you have to—it's really hard to get that angle right and you have to know what you—you know—everybody told me all these rules about steering. But I figured once you got to a certain point, you just had to steer on the in—you had to steer—it seemed like you were rowing into the middle of the river—that if you did that, you would get a better time. So, I was doing that and I was starting to pass people. And then I started noticing who I was passing. I was passing—you know—I was passing Lisa—Liz Hills. I passed Liz Hills. My God. I passed some—oh, then I passed Lisa Hanson. And then Lisa said, "Go Anne." I'm like, "I passed Lisa Hanson." You know, she was one of the—she was a bronze medalist in the world championships. I—

CK
0:34:57.4 She said, "Go Anne.?"

AM
And she said, "Go Anne," when I passed her and I—anyway, I didn't manage—anyway, so I got to the end of the race and I passed quite a lot of people, but I hadn't passed Joan Lind and she beat me. But I came second and that was like the—that was my—that was—that was—at that point, that was my greatest rowing experience. Prior to that, I had—that year was a great year for me, because I had gone to national championships in June on 1000 meters and I had won the intermediate single. And the people I raced in the intermediate single are like—you know—great rowers, like Chris Ernst, a very small girl from Yale. There was boat—book written about here by —called A Daisy for Chris and it was written by Mary Mosio. And she was a—she's become a plumber She's from—she went to Yale and she was in the bow of the 1976 Olympic women's eight and she got a bronze medal. She's about 5'4", the same size as my daughter. And she was in that race as a novice sculler. Carlie Geer was in that race as a novice sculler, silver medal in the women's single in the 1984 Olympics; one of the top—a lady who became one of the top Canadian lightweight Olympic rowers was in that race.

And I was in the race and I won that race, the intermediate single. Then I got a gold medal at the National Sports Festival. It's a bit of a joke, but I got a gold medal there. And then the best thing was the Head of the Charles, getting the silver medal—second place behind Lisa—behind Joan Lind and that set me up for going into 1979—going in the singles trials, coming third, then getting selected to the team, having this fantastic quad. And then in 1980, I was training with—Kris Korzeniowski was kind of coaching me, but I was left a lot to my own devices. I did a lot of training. My technique wasn't that great. I finished—I kind of—I think I finished third in the single trials, maybe fourth. And so, I was—and then I started to row a double with Lisa Hanson—to train for the double. And Lisa—and I had—she had chosen me over Liz, which I thought was really hard for Liz, but I said yes. And then the boycott came—the boycott announcement—a final boycott announcement came. And Lisa and her boyfriend, Greg Stone, decided that they would honor the boycott. That's how they felt. They had every right to do that, and they left the training camp. So, I no longer had Lisa to rowing—to row with.

So, I had—so, I was asked to row in the double with another lady, who—you know—we were good, but we weren't the best. We didn't—we came—I think we came third in the doubles trials. And then the both of us made the quad, but we—once we were in this quadruple skulls—you know, the four—each rower has two oars—two oars. So you're rowing them both very symmetric. We were in this boat, but we—we—I knew we weren't going to win it now. So, like I said, I passed the Olympic—the boycott just—it happened. I carried on. I was already training for the next Olympics.

CK
0:38:06.2 How—talk about that boycott and how were people making these decisions. What was that all—

Boycott of the 1980 Olympics

AM
It was about Afghanistan and it was about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. And, I mean I respect Jimmy Carter now as one of the Presidents that had one—who had one of the most strongest—you know—set of ethics as a President and as an individual after he left the White House. And, he also is quite amazing, because he took one of those new immunotherapies and he defied—he survived brain cancer. So you know, he's still there. Everybody was waiting for him to go and he's still around. What a guy. And I didn't agree with the boycott. I thought we should still compete and I thought it was wrong to put politics—you know—ahead of the Olympics. —and —I felt really bad about the boycott. But like I said, for me, I—I wanted to win in—win in the Olympics. And that was not going to be my Olympics. So it really went over head, in terms of the emotional impact. For people like Holly, who were in the eight, she was coxswain of that eight, she was never going to coxswain with an Olympic team again. She did go to the Olympics as a coach. That was her chance to win a medal as an—and that—that was her chance to—to win a medal that she was prepared to win. She was—you know—she was ready to take that boat and help them over the line, and—you know—and get that gold medal. So, for those people, it was really a big deal. And it's really interesting that we don't really have that many Olympic reunions, because a lot of—if you're on the Olympic team and you don't get a medal—you know—

CK
Oh, yeah. I'm starting to hear a buzz. So, we left off where there's this boycott, but it wasn't your time to win an Olympic medal. So, you're going on. Where does that put you next?

After the Boycott

AM
So after the 1980 sort of boycott year, I—well, I was in a situation where I still had a year of university. So, I went right back to university. I had Kris Korzeniowski as my coach. We had a great year, and he —he told me that—that I—my heart wasn't in the eight. I just wanted to do the single. And he was probably right, because I was trying to do both, and I didn't have the great Head of the Charles in 1980. It had been a long year, and I had a slight injury and —but I also should say that the—in sculling, the top sculler, Joan—she was—at the time, she was Joan Van Blom. She—it sounded—it looked like she was going to—she—the boycott must have been really hard for her to back the boycott. She was—she had taken a year off of her school teaching, so she was in really good shape for the 2000—for the 2000—for the 1980 Olympics. And she probably felt that even though she had come in fourth place the year before, she was in—she was going to do really well in the Olympics. After all, she had got the silver in '76 and there she was in '80 again. So, she just—so, it looked like that was it for her. So, all the other scullers, except for Lisa Hanson, kept going. Although Liz—Liz O'Leary went to sweep. Good move. She got a bunch of medals in the eight—in the women's eight—rowing in the women's eight as a sweeper, having switched from sculling. She was quite tall.

0:41:43.3 So, off I went doing the sculling and in 1981, I actually made my—I actually was able to win the singles trials for the first time ever. The single was the—was the second boat—it was the second boat chosen, so they—the U.S. team prioritized the double. This is my first—I'm starting to get the hang of the U.S. Rowing Federation. So, the way—what they just did was they decided that because we had a very, very strong double, which is true, in 2080 (sic)—the Geer sisters—Greer sisters—Judy and Carlie Greer—they—the national rowing—the rowing—the organizers—the Women's Rowing Committee, or something like that—decided that they would have the doubles trials first, so that Judy and Carlie could beat everybody, or race against any contenders. And they should prioritize this boat, because after all, we had a good chance of getting a medal in this boat. Great decision. And then everybody else who didn't go to the double could then try out for a quad. Well, I didn't want to try out for the quad. It was a very—there were a lot of new girls—new rowers coming in.

So, I only went to the singles trials. And I won the singles trials and I—I think I came in eighth in the world championships. I was really dozy on the start and I completely missed my chance to make it into the final! And I also—also, it was kind of—it was the start of me wondering kind of where the leadership was, because, this was my first year in the single. I was quite a strong sculler, but—you know—still had a lot of faults and needed a coach, and there wasn't anybody there to coach me. I didn't really have a coach for the world championships, so the coach of the double said he would coach me. Now, he had been coaching the double in the Olympics and that year, and they were used to him, so they responded to him. You know, when he told me to do something, it didn't make any sense. Nothing he told me made any—it's not that he's a bad coach. He just wasn't tuned into me. And, I needed a coach who would—where I would be the A-number one priority. I didn't get that in 1981. I still wanted to do the single.

So in 1981, I graduated from Princeton and I turned down all my job offers. I turned down all my business school offers and went to Boston and got a job in a sports store and started training for the Olympics. And, I didn't want to train on the Charles River with all my oppo and I had lots of oppo. They were all—a lot of them were training in Boston on the Charles.

CK
Your what?

AM
Opposition. So—because I had had—you know—I did—I had Kris as a coach. I had Kris Korzeniowski as my university's coach. So, I mean went from Kris Korzeniowski university coach to somebody else national team coach, they weren't as good as he was. And I felt disappointed that I didn't have a good—somebody as good as Kris. And they—they weren't necessarily bad coaches, except Kris was a good coach for me. He taught me about training, about interval training, about long distance training, about the feeling of the boat in a way that other coaches just—the next set of coaches I had—the one in 1979 was pretty good, but not as good as Kris. And in 1981, I didn't—this guy who was coaching me sort of temporarily in the single, that didn't go over very well. In 1982, I didn't have a coach at all.

0:45:10.3 But I love training and I lived in—I moved back in with my parents and worked part-time, did a lot of training. And one thing led to another and I had started doing ten-kilometer road racing to try and be fit, because fitness is really important in rowing. And, sometimes when you go out and row, if it's on the water, it's rough or if it's a team boat and it's not really rowing very well, you don't get such a good workout. But if you run hills or do a 10K race at like a six minute per mile—six minute—well, close to six minute. I couldn't quite do six minutes. But I could do like a 6:20 pace. That is pretty good. You will get fit. I had started doing that and I had met ladies from Liberty Athletic Club, which is a local running club, with a lot of Concord members. And I joined that rowing—that running club in 1982, while I was working in the sports shop. And the other thing I did was I went to a small long distance competition, like the Head of the Charles, but smaller. One that was on the Merrimack. It was called the Head of the Merrimack, near Lowell.

And I saw that they were—there was a rowing—a small boathouse in an old garage there and they let me—and I moved my boat from Boston to Lowell. So, I rowed on the Merrimack River. It was wonderful. And I would just go out there by myself and I like training by myself. I didn't—I didn't want to train with other people who just wanted to do 500 meter pieces all the time, because that's—didn't—that didn't—wasn't the right training.

So I wanted to do the right training and I did find a coach. I found a coach, a Canadian guy. It was okay. And it was helpful, because he really gave me a very high workload. So, I did track training—in the beginning, I did the track training in the spring of 1992, when I—after the winter, I'd done the 10K racing. But then when I started doing the track, when I first went there, they were doing track work—called track training, on a track at the Middlesex Vocational School. There's a track there. Liberty Athletic Club used to train there. And I was kind of a duck out of water. I mean, okay—you know—I was a rower and kind of—you know—chunky—you know—big. They said, "Oh yeah, we remember you from the 10K race. You are a pretty fast 10K racer, but why—what are you going to do on the track?" I said, "Well, I want to get faster on the start." They said, "Well, why don't you join the young—why don't you join the teenagers in their sprint practice?"

And, these are young girls, like twelve, thirteen-year-old girls and, they giggle all the time. So, I would spend a lot of time laughing and that's great. It's really good for you. And I loved it. I did these sprint—and I was—you know—pretty behind them. And then one day, they—the older ladies— some of them were pretty good runners. They said, "Well, why don't you do—there's no junior today. Why don't you do 400 meters? Why don't you do the quarter mile with us?" And I—and I was like five seconds behind on every quarter. And fine—we did a few. And then the coach, John Babington, said, "Anne, why don't you push," because he saw that I was actually getting better. He said, "Why don't you really push on this one?" So —so I pushed really hard and I did a quarter in seventy seconds. I've never done that again my life. He said, "Yeah. You got to do that some more." I said, "No, no." That just about killed me.

0:48:11.1 But they—so, they let me do—start training with the older ladies, but I really loved training with the girls, the younger kid. There was a girl—a ladies rowing—training club. And my —that summer in 1982, I won the 500 meter sprint of the national championships in the women's single. And it was that sprinting training with the kids that—with the teenage girls that did it. And —

CK
Where was that?

AM
This—the national championships were somewhere in New York State somewhere. And—but you know, this was all took place on the—on the track at—you know—at Minuteman Vocational School. And I lived at my parents' in Concord. And, I think that year, in 1982, I think I—Judy—I think I came second in the Head of the Charles, even though my time tied for first. But because Judy had done better the year before, she got to come first and I got to come second. But that was fine. I got a lot of seconds and thirds in the Head of the Charles those days. In 1983, same thing—I got second behind somebody who's really fast named Ginny Gilder. And in—so, in—let's go back to 1982.

So in 1982, I did really in the single. I came second in the—either second in the national championships and then third in the trials. But I didn't win the trial, so I didn't get to go in the single to the world championships in 1982. And I didn't go in the double either. But, I made the quad, and the quad had myself from Concord, Massachusetts; had Ginny Gilder from New York City, who went to Yale; had Carlie Geer, who went to Dartmouth; and Ann Strayer who went to Princeton. And I think we came in fourth. We were a pretty good crew. We had a coxswain named Chris something and we were fourth place in the world championships. And, that was in 1982. That's when in the fall, the Head of the Charles—Carlie Geer, who had been in the double, she—no, she had been in the single in 1982. I get all mixed up with—She had been in the single in 1982 and , I ended up being second in the Head of the Charles in 1982, behind Judy.

Then in 1983, things went really differently for me. So in 1983, also I was very strong in the single, and we had seat racing. So seat racing is when you take two boats and you—with either two or four rowers in them and you race them side by side, look at who—look—and measure the distance at the end of the piece—say a three-minute piece. So, Boat A beats Boats B by three lengths. Then you take two people—a person from Boat A and a person from Boat B and swap them and race them again. And then you can measure how much better A—the lady—the person who got—the two people that got swapped are. So we had these seat racing and quadruple skulls on the Connecticut River in Hanover, New Hampshire and I lost a lot of my seat races and I knew I wasn't going to make the quad. And the quad was named without me. And I told my parents and they were pretty upset. But I said, "You know, I lost all the seat races, so it was very fair. So, I'm going to try for the double."

So, they started the double selection. The double selection wasn't a trials that year. It was a selection by—they would just choose the double from the camp—from these camps. We weren't sponsored athletes. We would just pay for our own—ourselves all year long and train on our own, or with clubs, with occasional visits from the national team coach. And then we would go to this sort of four-week-long training camp at Dartmouth University, staying in people's homes, ahead of the world championships. Often we didn't get to go to early competitions to find out how good we were against the top folks. We didn't even—we just trained and went to the world championships. It was kind of sad.

0:52:06.5 But , it was at this camp and they—the coaches, Tom McKibbon and John Van Blom, decided that they would then—they had selected the quad and they would hold the doubles racing. But I also think—now I understand what they did as well. They thought that maybe they would look for other double combinations as well. Maybe they would look for someone from the quad, if they saw a really good doubles combination. I don't know. Maybe they did; maybe they didn't. I really don't know. To this day I don't know.

But they involved the people from the quad—the women who had already been named to the quadruple skull, so those four women. Some of them competed in the selection trials for the double. I guess it's also maybe to have a—have—let's say you have three doubles. You have a double from the quad, who's there to get the racing—you know—to make them work hard and train hard, and then two doubles who are contenders for the double. So, we had three doubles across or maybe even four. Because you had two—the two doubles from the quad and then two doubles trying to make the quad.

And it seemed to me that we went out to practice for two weeks in a row every day and every day they tried to get a combination where my boat wouldn't come first. And my boat came first almost every time, even against the quad—the girls—the ladies in the quad who were already selected, who were—you know—had beaten me in the seat races. But a double is a lot different than a quadruple skull; it's two people. And I had never really raced a double very much, but I was pretty good. And after about two weeks, they came up to me and they said, "Well, we're sorry to say that we have to name you to the team." I said, "Well, I'm sorry too." I don't know what I said, but they said, "We want you to row with Robin." And I said, "Well,"—I didn't really have any choice. I said, "Okay, let's go," you know. And —

CK
So, I don't get it. Are they giving you a compliment and you're joining the team or why sorry?

AM
Because I didn't want me on the team.

CK
That's so strange.

AM
Okay. So, they said —they were—there were two—three people—three key characters in this, so—besides me. One is Monica, who—Monica has passed away a couple years ago of brain cancer, so—and she became one of my best friends and we rowed a lot together after that. But at that time, we had never really rowed together. Monica is six foot tall. She was a runner up Heisman Trophy winner in basketball and she was a very strong rower, but she was very injury prone. And she didn't really do much training, but naturally she was just a totally gifted athlete and could do very well in races. I never understood that. And it wasn't until—it wasn't until years later that I really understood that.

CK
0:54:50.9 That she was gifted, rather than a trainer.

AM
Yeah, because I tried to get her to train with me. It didn't work. And it was my mistake. I could have stilled rowed together with, if I had figured out how to row—I couldn't—if I had done her training program, I would have—I just need to do training on my own. I could just train with Monica and do extra workouts on my own, right? Where was the guidance to tell me that? Nobody told me that. I—I learned it myself the hard way.

But —so, Monica had teamed up with this other lady named Robin. And when I was in the four—the four-man sculling boat—the quadruple skulls in 1982, Robin and Monica—two really new—relatively—their first year on the team. Fourth place in the world championships in the double. Beautiful boat, looked great together, and the coaches really wanted this combination to come together again and were pushing that for the Olympics.

But so, in 19—1983, the year before the Olympics, Monica was very injured and wasn't really in contention. And there was a newcomer named Beth. And Beth—her named was Beth Felosich. She was about 5'10", very, very strong—very strong. Like she could probably clean like forty pounds more than I could. You know, so you put the bar on the floor and you whip it up and catch it on your shoulders. She could clean it—you know—a lot more than I could. She could—you know—if you just stand—if you do—like jump from a standstill, to see how high off the ground you could jump, she could probably jump up to here. I could probably jump like this. I didn't—I just don't have that strength. I'm much more an endurance person.

So, obviously she should be in the boat. You know, she should be in the boat with Robin. And that's what they wanted. They wanted Beth with Robin. And to this day, I feel that the mistake they made was not putting Beth in the boat with me. But I don't think Beth ever reached her full potential. And I think when she was with me, that that really worked. But the thing is, whoever they put with me, I was trying to make it work, to make the team and everything that year.

So, off I went with Robin. And Robin was this beautiful technician. So they put me and Robin together and at this point, I had—I'd been—I had had—I was having trouble sleeping. I had had nightmares, because I felt like I was being persecuted. And, when they told me I'd made the team, I mean I was very relieved. And the first row we went out with with Robin—you know—I was exhausted. So I was paddling with Robin and they said it would be a light row, you know. So we came back in off the water and there was a big barbeque. Everybody was having this barbeque. And the coaches came up to me and they said, "We need to talk to you." I said, "Oh, okay." They came up to me and they said, "Well, we've changed our minds. You're not on the team." And this is the year before the Olympics. So, this is like my world falling apart. So, I was really upset and they said, "Well, you can come as a spare." I said, "I'm not going to go as a spare." And they said, "Well, you can to go the Pan American Games." This is the year of the Pan American games, I have to say. (Inaudible)

0:57:58.3 "You can go to the Pan American Games with Cindy." And I said, "Well, I'm not going to go to the Pan American Games with Cindy." So, I didn't think about whether I could go to the Pan American Games in the single, but, they said you—I can't remember. They might have offered that, but they—but I—I don't remember that coming into it. They said—but I said, "Could I go with Monica?" They said, "Well, Monica's injured." And I said, "Well, I'd rather go with an injured Monica than with those other—any of those other people you mentioned, except for Beth." So—but Beth was with Robin. They said Beth was going to go with Robin, not me. And I didn't say, "Why don't you put Beth and me in the boat," which is what they should have done. And Beth and Robin went to the world championships and they came—you can make—there's a final of—there's a six—six boat A final and a there's a six boat B final, and then there's the C final. They made the C final. Monica and I—well, actually I should go back.

So—so, that was the big barbeque that they told me I was in—was rowing with Monica. So, we started training again. And then they—the coaches decided that it would be fine for me and Monica to train against Robin and Beth—you know—give them some competition. So, with the practice, we went out and Monica and I were pretty challenged and we didn't do very well for our first couple of pieces. But , after a while—maybe it was a slightly longer piece—something just clicked and I said something to Monica. Usually—you know—when somebody says to you, "Oh, Anne, let's get—you know—let's get our act together. Let's do this. Let's do that," it doesn't work. But something happened and we beat the other crew. And then we started beating them. And then we started to really beat them all the time.

And, then one day—the coaches didn't say anything to us. They just had these practices. And, then one day, we were out in the Connecticut River, in the really wide part, in New Hampshire, near Dartmouth, because we were at Dartmouth, and they said, "Okay, we're going to do this piece." And Monica and I went off this way. Beth and Robin went off that way. So we didn't know we where we were. They went off that way. We didn't know what was going on. We didn't know who was winning, who was losing, we couldn't tell. We didn't know what the piece was all about. When it was over, they said, "Oh, that was the selection race. Beth and Robin won." (Laughing.) So, okay, you know. We didn't—we didn't know we were in—we were thinking to ourselves, "Come on. They've got to change their mind. This is ridiculous." Everybody in the camp was saying that. They were saying, "How come they're doing this?"

And so, Monica and I went off to the Pan American Games, and we did have a coach. We had a coach who was this lady named Joan Lind, who was the silver medalist from the Montreal Olympics in the single, fantastic rower. My total idol. I was so afraid to eat and be in the same room with her. I totally idolized her and I was just so awestruck to be around her. I had never mustered up the ability to have a conversation with her, even though I was on the team with her—in '78 Karapiro, New Zealand trip; '79 the Yugoslavia trip; 1980, the boycott year, we were on the team—we at least competed in some regattas; and then 1981, I didn't see much of her; and then 1982 I didn't see much of her; but in 1983 she was my coach in —she coached me and Monica in the Pan American Games. We won a gold medal. We didn't have that much competition, but we were pretty fast. And we got to know Joan, and it was great. And —, so I felt a lot more—a lot better about—you know—going back and trying to make the team, even though I had been cut. And, those very same coaches, John and Tom, were appointed as an Olympic coach. And —you know—people said, "Why don't you go to the wash-up meeting?" They have these meetings afterwards and—

CK
1:01:58.5 What'd you call it?

AM
A wash-up meeting. Well I learned that from my—my husband is a rowing coach—British rowing coach. He's retired now, but he still does coach accreditation. He was a school teacher. He taught chemistry and computing and he coached schoolboy rowing for many years, including the British junior team. And every year there was a junior world championships. Afterwards in the fall, there would be a wash-up meeting. But in the U.S.—you know—athletes can go to these things and people said, "Why don't you go and tell your story and tell—you know—say that—you know—that John and Tom should be held to—you know—to answer for what happened." But you know, it's the Olympic year and if they weren't going to coach, who was going to coach? So, I didn't do anything.

And I just went to their training camp in—in January, 1980, I went to LA—Long Beach, California to be in their training camp for the 1984 Olympics. And even though they had cut me—well, they had cut me the year before. So, I thought, "Okay, I'll just—you know—try to be a real team player and get the feeling of how they want to row the quad or whatever, so I have a chance of—you know—of making the team." And the order of preference would be the singles trials, then the quadruple skull selection, and then after that, the double. So, I really wanted to make the quadruple skull, so I'd make the team.

One of the things I really regret was I didn't tell the coaches that I wanted to row with Monica again. I wanted to make the team and I wanted to make the team in the single. I was very strong in the single. The Coach, John Van Blom, wanted Joan, who by then was his wife, who was one of the top scullers in the U.S. And she wasn't really—she wanted to be in the single too, but in practice, I beat her a lot.

CK
Your former coach?

AM
Yeah, yeah. She was coming out again. She had decided to train again and that happens. And she'd only pushed me just for one race. I mean she wasn't really my coach. You know, she was my coach for that race, which is like—you know—looking after us for the race—you know—checking everything and all that kind of stuff. But I mean—you know—she respected me too. And so, it wasn't like she was totally coaching me. It was like she was sharing her ideas about training and rowing with me, somebody she respected. And we got to be friends that way. And, we were doing a lot of training and I was obviously very strong, winning a lot of the seat races—winning a lot—we were training in singles and we were winning most of the races we did there, like two 500 meters or 2,000 meters. On the 400 meters, I wasn't as good. There were other people usually who were winning. But I would often win a lot of—at least—you know—more than half of the 500 meter pieces I could win. And I knew I was really good.

1:04:44.7 John had Joan and I—nobody else—everybody else participated, except for one lady who—one lady, who was really smart, said she was too tired to do this. I think it was either two or three weeks before the Olympic trials. John and Joan and I do three times ten minutes racing each other side by side. Of course, neither of us won the singles trials! So—but we were doing whatever we were told. We wanted to make the team. And she was his—you know—she was married to the guy and she was going to do it. So we did it. And the other thing is it—if Joan was going to do the ten minutes, I was going to do the ten minutes. And if she was going to go this fast, I was going to go faster. You know, we couldn't help ourselves!

1984 Olympics

So, we were—ended up in the quad in the 1984 Olympics, where we won a silver medal in LA's Olympics, which were held at Lake Casitas in California. We were coached by John Van Blom. We had a very strong group of rowers in the boat. We had Joan Van—Joan—by this time, she's—her name is Joan Van Blom. We had Joan Van Blom, who is one of the top scullers ever in the United States; silver medal in the 1976 Olympics in the women's single, and in this team. And we had Ginny Gilder, who was the Yale—from Yale, who was bronze medal in the women's single in 1983 world championships. That's when I got the gold in the Pan American Games.

And this lady named Lisa Rohde, who is very, very strong—a very, very strong athlete. And we were coxswained by a lady from the Slack Rowing Club in San Diego, who's cousin had coxed the 1976 Olympic eight—women's Olympic eight—coached by Harry Parker, that got the bronze medal. Kelly was a bit younger then and she was so awestruck by the idea of being a coxswain, that she wanted to become a coxswain herself. And she was our coxswain in 1984.

We were a very strong crew, very fine single scullers. We came second in the —in the competition. I think that individually we stacked up better than any other quad and I—and I think the Romanian quad that beat us was a—had a stronger—they were more of a higher sum of the parts than we were. We were four really, really, really strong rowers. And I personally think we could have—you know—we should have been able to win the gold. I kind of wish the race was over 2,000 meters, because we were really good distance athletes. And what's great is that—you know—even though it was Joan's last Olympics, it was Kelly's last Olympics, Lisa's last Olympics, and Ginny's last Olympics, it wasn't my last Olympics.

The following year, the distance changed from 1,000 meters to 2,000 meters. The decision wasn't made right away. And by that time, I had gone back to business school. I didn't want to go back on the Charles, in case I was going to—I was going to stop rowing. I didn't want to do 1,000 meters anymore. I didn't want to be on the Charles. Like MIT—I'd gotten into MIT. I didn't want to go there. And I didn't want to go to the University of Pennsylvania. There's a lot of rowing there as well. I could have gone to either of those business schools, and I wanted to do something different. And also, just
reflecting on what's happening now, I remember thinking to myself, you know, "Here I am, Economics graduate from Princeton University, I've only ever really worked in a sports shop or been a waitress at PJ's Pancake House at Princeton, and I've done a lot of rowing. I want to go into—you know--Economics. And all the jobs that are looking like—you know finance and banking and everything." I thought, you know, "If you're in finance and banking, you're not actually making something. You're just kind of—you know—pushing things along. You're not actually doing something constructive. How can I do that?" I thought, "Well, why am I doing this?" But then I thought, "Okay. Well, I'm doing it," you know. "I've got a degree in Economics. I got to carry on," you know.

1:08:32.8 So, after the 1985 Olympics—also, I felt the amount of nationalism about how many gold medals the Americans had won was a little misplaced, because the—for me—you know—as much as there was a great team experience and a fantastic accomplishment to get a silver medal in the Olympics, the top teams weren't really there. East Germany wasn't there; Russia wasn't there; China wasn't there. And in my event, Bulgaria also wasn't there. Certainly—Russia and East Germany were the top teams in this quad and some of the other ones, like Bulgaria, weren't that far behind. So, not having those crews there—you know—was a little bit of a—took a little bit of the shine off. And, I took the decision to—to go to school—to go to business school in France, because I had applied to one—a business school in France as well.

Business School in France

So in 1985, off I went to make my fortune. And I had gone on like a trip after the Olympics, back to New Zealand. My parents—my father grew up in New Zealand, even though he— his—his grandfather, who was the grandson of Captain William Skiddy, had lost his wife— my father's mother—in 1933 or '34, when my dad was about—my dad was born in 1931. My dad was about four, and he has a younger brother and an older brother. And they were packed off to New Zealand to live with their grandmother on a sheep station. So, when we went to New Zealand for the first world—my first world rowing championships in 1978, I visited the sheep station.

By then, my uncle, who used to live in Annursnac Hill in Bedford—in Concord—I don't know if you know Concord, but Annursnac Hill is the tallest hill in Concord. My daughter Rachel was running hills there this morning. My Uncle Peter used to live there. He was my father's younger brother. They all grew up in New Zealand. Uncle Peter moved back to New Zealand in 1975. In 1978, the world rowing championships—half the US team went down to his sheep station and had a whale of a time. And so I went back to New Zealand again in 1984 and to get—you know—just to have a little break.

But when I came back, then in November, I went off to—at the end of November, right after Thanksgiving, I went off to France, and I went to business school in France. I went to this place called INSEAD, Institute European of Business Administration, INSEAD. Anyway, it's a European—it's one of the top European business schools. I had known about it, because one of the professors had stayed at our house, and so I knew about it. I was—and I was — accepted there. And I arrived there in November, and they had a—it was only a one-year business school, and you could start in September and finished in May or you could start in January and finish in December. So I took the January to December. Because they said I didn't speak enough French, I had to go a month early. They were really—they were trying to sell their French course.

1:11:37.8 Anyway, I arrived in Fontainebleau with my oars. I didn't know if I was going to keep rowing, but I brought my oars just in case. And I arrived in Fontainebleau in late November 1985, and I went to live with the professor for a little while, while I looked for a place to live. And I started taking a French course. And the first day I was there, I got lost in the Foret de Fontainebleau running, because I was doing my running, because I was still training. I was doing my running training. I got lost in the Foret de Fontainebleau. And the second day, I went a different direction down to the bottom of the hill. It's on a—it's on a long, sloping hill. At the bottom of the hill is the town of Fontainebleau and then there's the town of Avon. At the bottom of the hill, this long slope, there's the Seine, and I found the boathouse. I couldn't find anybody. I found the boathouse. So, I knew where the boathouse was and I knew where the Foret de Fontainebleau was.

And then I started my French course, found an apartment—a really small apartment—La Rue des Parois, right next to the market square in the town. Tiny little apartment. It was like 120 francs a month rent. I mean that's like—you know—twenty dollars or something in today's money. And —I —the people I was staying with, the professor—the wife didn't really like me being there. So, I got out of there as quick as I can—as I could and I got—I moved—that gave me a great incentive to find the apartment. But she did me a favor. She told me about the club de—the club d'athlétisme. That's the track club. So, I joined the track club. And they also told me where to find the rowing club people.

So I found the rowing club people. And by that time, I heard that the distance for women's rowing changed—for women's rowing changed. Because you know, the guys got to race 2,000 meters, which is about a seven to eight-minute race in the women's single. It's about a six to seven—six to six-and-a-half minutes—minute race in a lot of other women's boats, like the eight or the quad. A thousand meters in a women's—in a fast women's eight is three—is around three minutes. And you know, it's a bit—the boat's only just getting going, as far as I'm concerned. So, the race distance was changed to 2,000 meters, so my—my intentions changed a lot. I really wanted to do rowing and, as well as business school.

So, I did—started training with the track club and learned about like instead of doing your distance running on the pavement, they said don't run on the pavement; run in the Foret de Fontainebleau where the—on the softer trails; it will be better for you. And they said—then when we did track practice, because I had done a lot of track practice with Liberty Athletic Club. When I did track practice with the Fontainebleau track coaches, who were French national team track coaches—I didn't know it at the time,, but—so they kind of knew what they were doing. They said I should do the intervals on the grass—they call it le pelouse—on the inside of the track, because it would be better for—you know—I wouldn't get sore legs or something. I don't know.

So I learned a lot from them and we did a lot of really interesting exercises inside, in the gym. It was quite small. It had these really small bleachers. I was used running Harvard Stadiums. Harvard Stadiums, you run up. It takes a long time to get each and go—you run up as far—as fast as you can to the top, jog down, move a set of bleachers. That's called the stadium. You can do that for a couple hours and you're toast. This is completely different. This is only a couple of steps. And I thought, "Well, where's the workout?" And they said—I started running up and they said, "No, no, no, no. You have to stand totally still. Don't bend your feet. Don't bend your knees. You have to stand upright, don't bend your knees, and you have to jump anyway." That's really hard to do. It's very explosive. You have to jump without—without—without springing—without using your knees. So, you have to use other muscles in your body that you never dreamed you had. So (Making a noise.) I was doing that all the time. Track. Or new track.

1:15:27.8 (end of Audio Track 1)

Audio Track 2

Training in France

CK
0:00:00 Okay.

AM
All right, so during the winter indoor training with the rowing—the athletic club was really good. It was also great for my French. They were—it was just like Liberty Athletic Club with all the little—the teenage girls. These were teenage boys mostly and some girls. Oh and we used to go on these long runs and they would—I learned all this French slang. And we used to do these fantastic cross-country workouts, like—you know—three times 2,000 meters running—you know—in the—where they have the horse trials in—like you have to run five kilometers to get there and then you do these two-kilometer—you know—training bursts and everything. Oh, I loved it. You get completely sweaty and I'd get home, I'd be totally exhausted. I mean I almost think that's the reason I trained. I didn't care about the competitions. I just liked doing this. The training was great.

And I started—I met the rowing coaches. I went out in a training session—I actually went into Paris for a training session with the local—the club coach from Fontainebleau was also coaching in Paris. And I went on a training outing with him in Paris. It was really terrible. I mean there were these French—junior French national team rowers; they were complaining. They didn't want to do it. And so, we did—we survived that. And we went to lunch at his house afterwards and the girls ate all of his chocolate pudding. I thought, "What?" And then the next day, we went to Fontainebleau. We went rowing again and again the girls were complaining. And then finally, at the end of the day, Jean Pierre said, "Okay, now I will go out in a single with you."

By this time, I was kind of, "I'll do this." Just—I just was doing that so that I would get the key to the boat club, so I could—you know—go open the door to the boathouse, get the boat out and train. I was doing all this so I could do that. And I was learning about being polite in French and kissing everybody both sides of the cheek. And I was getting a bit fed up. And Jean Pierre finally came out in the single with me, and after an hour of him in the single, even though my French was just—you know—I was still learning the French and everything. Well, I was pretty good at French, because I did it in school, but I didn't understand him totally.

It was like having Kris Korzeniowski coach me. This guy was fabulous. He was a great—he is a great coach. He just had a feeling for the boat and he—like if he rigged my boat, my boat would feel much better. If he went out in a session with me, it would feel better. When we did a training outing with me, he knew about training. He would say, "Okay, this is a quality track workout. I want you to do the first piece at three-quarter power." Okay, and then he would do the first piece. And we would rest a certain amount of time. "Okay. Now this piece, you're going to do it a little bit harder." And then when we would get to the next—we'd get to the third and the fourth, he would say, "Okay, these are the quality pieces. This has to be absolutely full power." And I would do that. And then I would be so tired, I would just go easy on the next two. I mean that's a much better workout than just thrashing your way through six times 500 meters. He was really good.

0:02:54.4 Jean Pierre coached me in 1985. While I was at business school, I managed to go with the French rowing team—John Pierre was not a national team in France. He didn't have the certificate. And he worked in the defense industry, so he wasn't allowed—well, the one year he could have gone to the junior thing, he wasn't allowed to go, because it was in East Germany. But he was a really good coach. And he didn't always come with me to the competitions, but he would help me—he would say, "Oh, just go on—go to this part of Paris and get on the French national team bus and you'll go to this international rowing competition. And I'll put your boat on the French trailer." I had to borrow a boat. Eventually, I got loaned a really good boat from one of the top boat—you know—makers in—in Europe, call Empacher.

So in 1985, I went to three national—three international competitions, prior to the U.S .trials and the world championships. Then I went back to the US, won the U.S. trials, easily, because I had been doing this fantastic training with Jean Pierre and with the track club. I had also gone to a lot of cross-country competitions and track competitions with the track team. You know, I was like a JV runner, you know! And but it was really good for me and I was really getting very, very confident in the single. I won the singles trials and then I got third place in the world rowing championships. It was like—to me it was the best medal I'd ever won. It was the single. The people in the final were East Germany, Romania, myself, Canada, Austria, and some other—maybe Russia or something. So, I was up there with the top rowers from East Germany and Romania. Romania had rowed—was the Olympic medal winner from '84. Romania had gone to the Olympics in 1984. East Germany hadn't. And East Germany was the favorite—you know—the favorite to win in 1984, but they boycotted. So, it was great to be in the same race with them. And that—that just—from then on, all I would think about them was 1988. And Jean Pierre stayed with me for the next three years.

So, it was quite an adventure, because in 1986, I got really over-trained. I was—I had no financial support. I was doing this on my own steam. I had a student loan to pay for the—to pay for INSEAD. The German boat builder—

CK
0:05:16.3 To pay for what?

AM
To pay for my business school.

CK
Okay.

AM
I had a student loan and I got $1,500 from the Women's Sports for being—for getting—for being a good—you know—the good rower. But my parents couldn't really give me any money and I didn't have a job. So, at the very—the last term of my business school, I got a job—I got a job at the business school writing case studies, so I could pay for some of the tuition and pay for myself. But during the summer of that year, 1985, I had a job in Paris to pay for the—to pay. And I used to go to the rowing club in the morning in Fontainebleau. And there was no shower. I had to put a hose over my head—put other clothes on, go to the train station, go—it was—it was a disaster of a job, but at least I earned some money.

Crashing in 1986

And, so, getting ready for the 1988 Olympics—you know—I—like I didn't—students at the INSEAD, they used to have this big lunch. I didn't really have any money to have the lunch. And plus I was training, so I didn't—I didn't have good nutrition. I crashed in 1986. So, that—what does that mean? That means all of a sudden, my performance went down. I became really—I was —I didn't—I wasn't up to my normal self. I won the—I won the trials easily in 1986, but my performance in world—in the international championships dipped. I had won a trip to the Goodwill Games, but when I got to the Goodwill Games in Moscow in—you know—it was when Gorbachev was the leader, I think, and it was this—you know—friendship between U.S. and Russia. And I had one of the worst rows in my life and I came last. There was only one other rower, Russia, and I had beaten her before. And she beat me in this competition.

And by that time, I had started—that time—actually, by that time, I had finished INSEAD, and I had gotten a job at J.P. Morgan Asset Management in London. I had started working in London. My work permit hadn't worked out, so I had to spend—I was actually based in New York. It was a complete mess. Jean Pierre came over to New York and trained—we trained on the Harlem River. And we trained on the Harlem River during the week, and we trained at Princeton on the weekend. We used to campout at Princeton in the boathouse on the weekend. And I had my racing boat at Princeton. We went up to Concord one day for —and we did some training on the Merrimack. And Jean Pierre made Lobster Thermidor for my parents in Concord. It was great.

And anyway, but before all the New York thing happened—so, I had—I had done the trials in the US. I was working for J.P. Morgan, training in the U.S., because I started working at J.P. Morgan and I moved to New York in May—late May, 1986. And , did the trials. I won that. Went back to work. I went to a competition—then I had won this trip to the Goodwill Games in the middle of—at the end of July. And so, off I went to the Goodwill Games. And, I was really—that—I was—it was really catching up to me. That was when I was really down. I had already shown signs of it, but this is when I was really down. And, I went to this competition in Switzerland on the way to the Goodwill Games in Moscow. The competition in Switzerland is called the Rotsee. It's the big competition of the year, prior to the world championships and I had done—I had done poorly there. So, I thought, "Well, I may as well just carry on training."

0:08:37.5 So, when I got to the Goodwill Games, I was even worse. And after the end of it—John Pierre wasn't there. And there were a bunch of U.S. coaches. They didn't say anything to me. It was the Russian coach that came up to me—two of them, because I spoke some Russian—and they sat down, and they said, "Okay, you need help. This is what you should do." And they told me, day one, day two, day three. And they had like fourteen days—two weeks—I think it was even longer, where every day they told me what to do, which was basically nothing. They said run two kilometers, jog two kilometers, paddle three kilometers, jog two kilometers, paddle three kilometers, do some stretch. You know, they said, "Don't train." And they gave me a big— you know—a big —a big lecture about what I—what I had done wrong and how I needed to—but anyway, so that was a great thing that they—that I took home with me from the Goodwill Games.

And the other thing—this is kind of interesting—is that I didn't want to go home with nothing. So after my race was over—it was terrible—I took the boat—we were at the rowing canal. It was about fifteen kilometers outside of Moscow and it's right next to the Moscow River. So I snuck my boat over the Moscow River and I rowed almost all the way to the Kremlin, just because I could. Because nobody could touch me. I was an American. I was on the Goodwill Games. You know, they were going to protect me, weren't they? So I went—and they—and they—the police boat came and told me to turn around and go back! So, I asked for some water in Russian. They gave me some water in a glass, you know.

And so, I came—after that, I felt like I had done something. I had at least rowed to the Kremlin. But—and then I did my rest. And I improved a lot, and I was—I came fifth place in the world championships in Nottingham that year, with a bad cold. I had won my semifinal, so I was—you know—it wasn't great, but I was back in business.

And then, Monica, who I rowed with in 1983 Pan American Games—I forgot to tell you that she lost her father in 1985. And when I was living in France and getting trained by Jean Pierre in 1985, she came over and spent a couple weeks with me, and we raced together in the double in Lucerne and I—that's when I got the bronze medal in the single and a silver medal in the double with Monica. So, that was one of our other races together. And also, we won the national championships in the double in 1986. And, she then went on to compete in the Olympics, but not with me in the boat. So, I felt—I always felt really bad about that. And I was very sad when she died about five years ago of brain cancer.

And, anyway, so after 1986, I thought to myself—actually, in 1986 I did try to row with Monica again, so I'm getting this a bit mixed up. So, I thought Monica—this is where I made the mistake. I was—still hadn't—didn't get my work permit to work at J.P. Morgan in London, so I was working at J.P. Morgan in New York. So, Monica was in California. This other lady named Barb Kirsch was in Philadelphia. So, I started doing some training with Monica. But I thought she needed the competition, so I said, "Look, I will either row with Monica or with Barb Kirsch."

0:11:46.1 Because—oh, when I was training in the fall of 1986—so, I had finished the world championships in 1986. I had finished INSEAD. I started working at J.P. Morgan, but I was in New York, because I failed my work permit. I was living in New York, but on weekends—Jean Pierre was in France. I was training on my own. On weekends, I kept going to Princeton. And one day, I was doing—I would go to Princeton, and I didn't have my racing boat there. I had an old—I had like a training boat. It was really slow. And I was rowing there and my—you know—I would go there. In the morning I would do twenty kilometers, and then at lunch I would run hills. I would run up from the boathouse up to the top of Nassau Street. It's about a mile up, a mile down, a mile up, a mile down. I'd do like five or those or something. Maybe it wasn't quite a mile, but it was a long workout. And then I would do another row in the afternoon. I'd do that on a Saturday. Then on Sunday, I would do another long row and then—then I would go back to New York and I might do weights or something. That would be—that was my weekend.

CK
I'm going to have to pause here.

AM
Yeah so, in 1986, —I had a—I had a pretty good result in the single, but I was—really wanted to get a medal in the Olympics. And also, I was really intrigued by the result I had had with Monica in the double. So, in 1987, I ended up rowing in the double instead of the single, not with Monica, but with Barb. We got a bronze medal.

1988 Olympics

So going into 1988, it was really difficult. I—so, what I thought I would do is double up. So, Barb and I tried to double up. She, like Monica, was injury-prone. She fell—she succumbed to an injury, so I ended up just doing the single with Jean Pierre. And by that time, I was in pretty good shape, but I was—on paper I was only fourth place. There was East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania all ahead of me, plus possibly Russia. So maybe I was only fourth or fifth at best.

So, I thought to myself about that training camp I did back in 1978 with the—when I first was on the sculling training camp at Lake Tahoe, this high altitude. I thought, "Why don't I try high altitude?" So, off I went to —to the Donner Lake. And after I did all my pre-Olympic competitions, bronze medal in Lucerne. , so the big competition prior to the Olympics was Lucerne. I got third place. So, I was—

CK
Donner Lake is in—

AM
Oh, the lake in Lucerne is in—that's where we do the rowing with the big competition in Switzerland. I got bronze medal. Then, from then on, no more competitions until the Olympics. High altitude training camp. Donner Lake—you know—it's way up in the mountains, right?

CK
0:14:20.0 In?

AM
In Nevada—in California—California. Donner Lake, Truckee, think of the Donner Pass.

CK
Okay, so there you are. The high country.

AM
Yeah. And yeah—and my Aunt Joyce— my late Aunt Joyce, she's from the Donner family. So, I was quite interested in that, but it's kind of an episode in American history we don't want to talk about too much. But everybody's knows—everybody's heard about the Donner Pass—all the cannibalism and everything, with the wagon trains. So, there's a lake up there that's—that I trained on. And I trained on a lake at high altitude, where you kind of lose your breath really quickly and it alters your blood composition, so you have more oxygen-carrying capacity in your blood. And I got—and also, I chose Donner Lake because it's—you could then go down to San Francisco, get a flight from San Francisco, to Tokyo, and then Tokyo to Seoul. That's where the Olympics were. So that worked out brilliantly.

I had to fight—my Jean Pierre, he wasn't really accepted by the U.S. team as a coach. When I went to get my—I had to fly down, just for the day, to L.A. to get my Olympic equipment—you know—all my clothes and everything. And , I was talking on the phone to the team manager and I said, "Well, what about Jean Pierre?" They said, "Well, we're sending your ticket to go down there for the day. You won't—you know—you could go back to high altitude that night." I said, "Okay, great."

CK
Go back to?

AM
High altitude. Because you got to be up there. You got to stay up there for the blood thing to work. So, I said, "What about Jean Pierre's ticket?" They said, "Oh, he's French. He can't be on the team." I said, "Well, what do you mean? He's my coach." So, that was a battle. I won the battle. Jean Pierre came with me, and he got all this stuff! So, he was quite pleased. Anyway, Jean Pierre—because he wasn't allowed to be on the French team, because he didn't have the certificate.

So, then we went—off we went to the Olympics. And —you know—I was a lot small—well, I wasn't—the Bulgarian wasn't that big, but the East German had won a lot of world championships. My best place had been silver medal in the 1984, without the Eastern Europeans, and bronze medal in the single, and bronze medal in the double. So you know, I wasn't really that highly touted. But I—I had a really good competition. I had easy—the heat was easy. I was rowing at a very low rate. So, in the big competitions, you want to be rowing like thirty-five—thirty-four, thirty-five strokes per minute. I was rowing my heat at rate twenty-five, because I was so far ahead. In the semifinal, I had East Germany and East Germany won the semifinal. I came second. And I was telling myself I was holding back, but I kind of was worried about her. And then I had a great final and I—what happened was the favorite was Bulgaria. And I now know that Bulgaria and East Germany were all taking steroids and everything. And the East German lady, she has admitted to it and the Bulgarian lady it was very clear, because the following year she was completely changed. She wasn't anywhere near as strong as she was.

0:17:27.7 And, the Bulgarian lady had won the world championships in 1987. She had won the—the Rotsee competition in Lucerne that I—where I came third, and she went off to a really, really fast start in the final. And the East German went after her, and I mean a lot of people said, "Oh well, the East German broke the Bulgarian." And once the East German was catching up with the Bulgarian, she just blew up and I went past her as well. So, maybe I owe everything to the East German. But anyway, it felt great for me coming in second place. And —you know—obviously I wish I had won the gold medal, —but, I'm very proud of having won a silver medal for the U.S.

I took the following year off. By this time, I was working full time at J.P. Morgan. By this time, I was working in London. I was in a lot of my training on London—on the Tideway tidal, just like the Swampscott, where I learned to row. And I carried on, this time, with an East German coach. And even though I only got fourth place in the 1992 Olympics, I was—I felt that I was at the top of my game. I had moved on. I had improved. My times were faster and my first 1,000 meter was faster. My start was faster. I was very, very competitive and I just think I had—you know—I didn't do it on the day. I don't—I have personal reasons why I think something happened, but I'm very proud of my fourth place finish in Barcelona. And I'm also very proud to have competed in Boston, at the Head of the Charles, many, many times, including seven victories in the women's championship single, with all the crowd of—the local crowd cheering me on. It's been fantastic and I want to thank all those people that were cheering me.

And I wish everybody luck in the 2016 Olympics, including Gevvie Stone, who's the daughter of Lisa and Greg, who visited my parents'—my uncle's ranch—sheep station in New Zealand in 1978. So, we've come a long way since then.

CK
It just gives me chills to think about her doing it now. I've got to ask why you flew, on your own steam I hear, back to Concord for this time to do interviews and the panel. What is it about Concord that's staying with you in the middle of such an incredibly rich life and living?

Life Now in the UK

AM
Well, I have a very active life in the U.K. and my daughter— my daughter is on a rowing team, so I'm a rowing mom, which means—you know—driving around to lots of practices, packing food all the time. She has to take food with her to school, because otherwise she would go hungry, because the food doesn't—they don't give her enough at school. So, I'm very busy as that—at that. I'm involved in Financial Market Integrity in the U.K., which is a very important theme and very important thing I believe in. So, I'm very, very busy. But also I'm from Concord and my parents still live at 1325 Lowell Road. And they're in their eighties and , my brothers, sisters, and I are delighted to be looking after our parents as they age. And that means we're in Concord as much as we possibly can. Also, I wanted to thank —John Bigelow, because in a lot of ways I did it for John Bigelow. Because he's a single sculler like me and every single sculler has—I mean the only single sculler who was a total cheerleader and a totally flawless individual is Joan Lind. I mean she's beyond belief. And the rest of us—you know—you know—we—we were driven by some demons. And, I wanted to make sure I did this when John asked me.

CK
0:20:58.9 Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful story. Thank you so much. You really put your heart in this.

0:21:03.9 (end of Audio Track 2)

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Text, audio and image mounted 17 September 2016 -- rcwh.