Interview with Gearóid Towey: Keith Dugganprofiles the Cork man who will end an eventful rowing career after Beijing.
THERE IS a huge whale ghosting through the soft furnishings and silver tea trays of the foyer of the Westbury Hotel and the chattering class does not even notice.
"He was circling us for a while and then he went over there," Gearóid Towey explains with a nonchalant wave toward the bay window.
"A big brown f***ing thing. Then, at speed, it starts coming straight for us. And there is nothing we can do about it. You are just sitting there, mouth open. Then, at the last minute, it just glides underneath us," and his hand swoops under the upholstery of his French chair.
"And we never saw him again. He was just having a laugh with us."
The Cork rower was reminiscing about some of the more cheerful interludes in what he refers to as "the Atlantic thing" of two years ago, when the boat in which he and his rowing partner, Ciarán Lewis, were attempting to cross the ocean got chewed up in a flash storm and left the Irishmen bobbing on the vast blue nothing in what felt like a toddler's paddle pool.
It is difficult, sitting in the fabulous comfort of a Dublin hotel, with a view of the summer crowds drifting down Grafton Street and the strains of a string quartet playing sweet music on a muggy summer's day, to try and imagine what it must be like to be lost on the ocean in a blow-up dinghy. Towey only began to appreciate the scale of the Atlantic as he rowed out into it: they rowed hard for three days simply to lose sight of the retreating coast, simply to be out there.
From the beginning, as a child out on the Blackwater River or during those burning morning heats at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, Towey's concept of rowing was based on covering a finite surface of water.
This was different. This race felt endless and brought a higher understanding of tedium. And while there were many rowing regattas that were so relentlessly, horribly tough that they made him feel as if he had nearly died, this race might actually have killed them. What sounded like a Boy's Own Adventure - the Irish men were, happily, picked up by a gas tanker bruised but unbowed - was a brutally cold and deadly dangerous experience. And while they never got heavy or existential about those days, Towey is open enough to accept that Lewis and he are lucky to be alive.
The wave that hit them was no Perfect Storm-size swell but it was enough to punish the men for daring to cross the ocean on a planed piece of plywood.
"The wave that capsized us was about 10 metres high. It felt pretty Hollywood at the time. I saw it coming and knew we hadn't a chance. I was chucked off the boat. Ciarán was below deck grabbing some kip. And I was expecting to be knocked unconscious by the boat falling back on me. I remember thinking: 'Dead. Definitely dead.' And I couldn't believe it when I resurfaced.
"But those next 20 seconds when I didn't know where Ciarán was were awful. You know, the trip was my idea. And I was thinking, 'If Ciarán is dead, I'm dead.' Then he resurfaced and he knew by the look on my face, by how overjoyed I was, that this was a serious situation.
"We were on the base of the boat watching most of the cabin and our stuff floating away. Thing is, once we got in the life raft, I felt we had a chance. Ciarán thought we were screwed . . . We were 1,000 miles from the finish and way off the shipping routes.
"We had seen a yacht about four days earlier and my hopes were on that. There was a huge storm, with lightning and rain that was so hard you felt it would go through you. We were in this raft thing and you would hear these waves coming at you and then the boat would flood.
"But I never thought: why the f**k did I do this? I went for the adventure of it. And I know it was a close call but I was never really regretted it because if I had died, well, at least I wouldn't have been thinking, what a stupid idea this was. I would have felt you reap what you sow. If you are going to put yourself out on the ocean, you have to kind of expect it."
Everything about the rescue, from the reaction of the astonished seamen to the sheer luxury of fresh linen in a private cabin, had a dreamy quality about it. In fact, Towey only ascertained for sure heaven was not a ship filled with hirsute Spanish sailors when he took a satellite phone call from Ireland and, waiting on the other end, was Dessie Cahill telling him he was live on RTÉ.
Towey laughs at the memory. At 28, he has that incredibly spare look that separates endurance athletes from the rest, a frame so slender, toned and sinewy one would fear he was malnourished were it not for the glow of robust vitality. He can't really explain what compelled him, like Ishmael, to "see the watery part of the world" any more than he can fully account for his continuing devotion to rowing. Beijing will be his third Olympics and he grins broadly when he admits he would have dropped the sport stone dead had he made the medal podium with Sam Lynch at the Athens Games.
"Yeah, I would have stopped. Because I don't believe in sticking with the one thing all your life. And I am not one of those fellows who goes out rowing for pleasure. It would have been easy to stop."
And yet it might have been impossible too. At 28, he is a veteran of the international rowing scene and if there is a convenient explanation for his ascetic devotion to what is a limitlessly punishing and comparatively obscure sport, it comes down to a restlessness of spirit common to all rowers. He felt it burning on his very first time on the water, when he sat as a seven-year-old beside a cox on the Blackwater river and felt the thrilling speed of the boat and the shades of light on the water rushing past his eyes and the river close enough to reach out and touch.
And he recognised kindred spirits when he went with his dad and his sister Jeanette, a world champion rower, for events all over Ireland. These races felt like a cult movement because they received no publicity or fanfare but drew hundreds of competitors. It was a subculture and Towey liked that.
Neal Byrne from the Commercials club in Dublin was Towey's arch-rival during those school weekends, the guy he both loved and hated racing against. He laughs now at the absurdly punishing regimes he put himself through at home in Fermoy.
He was an obsessive, scouring the rowing magazines that were delivered to the family home and watching tapes of Eurosport coverage so much he can still hear David Goldstrum's commentaries in his mind.
Rowing became his adolescent escape route; making an Irish team the equivalent of forming a rock band and playing on Top of the Pops. There is a spookily beautiful photograph of Towey out on the Blackwater with a great period house in the background - "Michael Flatley's gaff," he clarifies - but those formative years were too intense and solitary to be classed as truly enjoyable.
"My parents had to tell me to calm down. It became addictive. Every weekend we had the boat on the roof of the car and we would go to some boat race. It's weird, because nobody hears about these things - you don't even see the results in the paper the next day. But there would be hundreds of people there. And that is what attracted me to it. You could be down in a field in Limerick at a regatta when you're a young fella and it is like the centre of the universe. But no one else knows about it. It's like Fight Club. But then when you move on to the international scene, there is a respect there among other rowers. Everyone knows you are in it not for fame and glory - in fact, you don't know why you are in it."
At the age of 20, Towey had accomplished his lifetime goals of winning a World Championship medal and rowing in an Olympics - he made the lightweight fours for Australia with Byrne, Neville Maxwell and Tony O'Connor. But he wasn't the first sportsman for whom the lure of an Olympic medal became a quixotic fixation. His pairing with Lynch for the double sculls in Athens demonstrated the zealous self-denial that governs elite rowers.
To make the weight, both men rationed themselves like fashion models trying to make the grade for the catwalks of Milan - except that they went through excruciating training sessions twice daily. Towey operated at around 69 kilos, 10 less than his natural weight. Lynch, at 6ft 3ins and normally weighing 84 kilos, could not exceed the 71-kilo mark. They were like jockeys without the champagne and cigarettes.
"Yeah. And except that we were also the horse."
They trained hungry and sweated off their excess fluid on race-days so that they generally rowed dehydrated. It flew in the face of standard athletic practice. But then much of rowing does. In Athens, they must have been hexed by one of the Greek gods. Lynch gashed his finger with a bread knife on the eve of their first race, causing such a plummeting drop in his blood pressure that he passed out. He came through as Towey was putting an ice vest on him shouting, "I'm not losing the plot, I'm not losing the plot."
Then Towey fainted on the morning of their heat, weakened by a combination of the heat and an intense sweating row. He was tying the boat down and felt woozy and came to as the American team was walking by, looking down at him in amazement.
The Irishmen blitzed the field in the heat but were squeezed in a terribly tight semi-final despite posting their second-best time. Even then, Towey had China on his mind. He jokingly refers to himself as the old man on this crew - Paul Griffin and Richard Archibald are rowing in their second Olympics and Cathal Moynihan is the new man. Sydney is a distant memory and although he remains good friends with that trio, most of his former team-mates have made their peace and joined the real world. The Sydney boys disbanded shortly after those Games, Byrne quitting the sport in his early 20s.
"Neal always had other interests. He is a great musician and he wanted to go after that. It was as if rowing was something he had to get out of the way and he kept it up for a while after Sydney but his heart wasn't in it. And so he made the right decision."
Still, Towey has innumerable friends who leave rowing without ever entirely quitting it, not in their souls. Some guys went studying, others went to Wall Street and made a bundle of money but were destined, like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby to "drift on, forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game".
"They all yearn for the competition again," Towey says. "They struggle to leave go of that whole eccentric gathering of, well, special people, I think, that you do meet at rowing events. There is insanity involved and it is sort of a club and people miss that when they leave. People say to me I am nuts for doing this - but in a nice way. I see it all in a different light. I think that sitting in an office and having nice things but not being healthy is way more nuts. Guys I know, a lot of them have done the corporate thing and they are happy. But once I got to the Olympics, I think people felt I made the right decision. You do need money to live. But I don't have the aim of being rich or having loads of cool stuff or a nice car.
"So there is no pressure there. As long as I have enough. And it took me a while to figure that out. I know I can move on. I know I can."
He talked about that a lot with Ciarán out on the Atlantic - particularly after they managed to drop three I-pods overboard in a matter of days. He often thinks about that surreal hour of reunion with civilisation, when the gas tanker slowly rolled in over the Atlantic dusk, like a floating palace. They had to shimmy up a rope ladder while sloshing at the port of this 250 metre- long vessel, climbing up a sheer wall of steel. If they fell, they were gone: no question but they would have been sucked under. They were both practically naked and had heavy beards and because they had crawled on their own little boat for the previous fortnight, their legs were gone. They couldn't walk on the deck and so collapsed onto their hunkers, like some wild parody of humanity before the astonished crew. "Like monkeys," Towey nods in satisfaction.
Those 40 days on the ocean gave him the power to put rowing in its place. It remains at the epicentre of his life but come September, Gearóid Towey will take up a place in the Bridge Theatre Company in London. He has no acting experience but has always been fascinated by drama and, while he is not quite sure how, a recitation of Shylock's "revenge" speech secured him one of the 20 available places for next autumn.
"I just did it the way I thought it should sound."
Beijing then, is a last fling and an encore to a rowing life that can be traced back to the fledgling days in Cork, when his rowing was guided by an absolute fear of flipping the boat as he had not learned to swim. From the home river to the ocean is quite a journey and he still has yet to flip a boat - getting upended in a storm does not count. Unlike at Sydney and Athens, the Irish rowers do not go into these Olympics feted as likely podium heroes. Towey is circumspect about the Irish chances.
"Two years ago, we were medallists at the World Cup against the same competition. But we had a disastrous year last year and it was a mess. This year has been day by day.
"If we make the final, the expectation will go haywire. And if that happens, we won't be afraid to say we want to win a medal."
Because it will either happen now or it won't. Towey is content with that much. A medal in Beijing would be an unimaginably perfect closing act but rowing rarely allows perfect endings. Whatever happens, Towey believes he can leave the boat behind him now with no regrets. He has only a matter of weeks left anyhow before he takes up the actor's life. What a singular and glorious way to leave. Exit, as they say - pursued by a whale.