Rowing Interview with Sam Lynch: Weather brings no respite. A shroud of fog hangs over the mazy Guadalquivir erasing the Puente del Alamillo to the left and the Puente de Barquetta to the right.
The far bank has disappeared and from the still, cold water there issues only the shouts and whelps of careless kayakers, kids messing about in boats. Sam Lynch takes a look. No weather for rowing.
It's the end of a hard, hard week and every muscle he has is complaining. Damn it, there are uncharted, unmapped regions of him texting in complaints. Every week builds and builds till the Sunday morning session, and like old lags they dream of the parole time that is Sunday afternoon. And when it comes around, when Sunday afternoon arrives they collapse into bed, lounge on sofas, read books and dread Monday.
This is Sunday morning and now the mist offers a reprieve. On the four docks down below the Residencia de Deportistas here on Isla Cartuja in Seville there are just two abandoned pair of runners. Two rowers out on the water. Enough.
Perhaps the weather has made Sunday afternoon come early. Gracias.
He banishes the thought. He stretches his aching limbs and goes for a run instead. A 100-minute run. Punishes the muscles till they threaten to desert him or sue him. Purges the guilt. One hundred minutes. That finishes the week. Full stop. Lie down. Die. Don't think about tomorrow.
Thor Nilsen is away. His absence scarcely matters or registers. Seventy-three-year-old coaches don't hurl cups or bang tables. Thor Nilsen never did that anyway. As a kid in Norway the local river was frozen for most of the winter and training for a rower was a matter of improvisation and innovation. Thus the habit of a lifetime was formed.
If Sam Lynch wanted to lie in bed this morning he could. But Thor Nilsen knows by now that Sam Lynch wouldn't be here if he was the sort to lie in bed on a Sunday morning merely because he was tired and felt like his body was breaking.
Thor is away and still they revolve like satellites around him, this tight little crew of Olympic hopefuls. They complete his weekly programme. Some stoics. Some moaners. No quitters. And they look at next week's programme and it is worse. They know, though, that they'll do it all.
Rowing lends itself to coaching. To people with lots to say. Even in the fog, Sam Lynch knows there will be coaches out somewhere on the river riding up and down in launches passing comment on every blade that enters the water. Thor is a still point in all this flurry. He will sit in a boat and they'll row past, 4k this way and 4k back. Sometimes he'll say nothing. Sometimes he'll say, Sam, think about your posture at the catch.
If you are experienced he'll let you figure it out yourself. His silence is your reward. He won't prod you if things are going well. Maybe he'll come and plant a seed the next day when you are doing some weights. Just a sentence or two.
So they coach each other in the boats. Sometimes there are disagreements and Thor lets them pass like the tide. He wants it to come from them. Wants the experience to make them whole people. When Sam thinks about it, rowing is the least of what he has learned in the years with Thor. Lessons for life off the man. That's what he's taken.
They love being coached by him. They're a quiet, uncommonly close-knit group. Thor likes to be aware of what's going on, every aspect and nuance. Just aware, though. Like when he sits in his boat and watches impassively as they all go past. He knows what's going on. Who is down. Who is up. He'll let conflicts go. If you go to him with a problem you're having with somebody else, he'll say that guy has always behaved like that. The problem is yours.
Get over it. It's the way you react that the problem is.
A short while ago they had a sports psychologist in and she suggested to the group that when disagreements festered they needed to be aired, that when a kink in another character began to bother you it needed to be confronted. And Sam Lynch said you've got to be joking. I have a problem with somebody then it's my problem. I deal with how I deal with it. I don't deal with the person. They all nodded. Pure Thor.
He'll never take anybody out of the programme. And he'll never spare you. You have to go to him and say you are too tired today. And when you do that you know what's next. A question. What were you doing that made you too tired? Up too late? Did you have a drink? Chase a woman? You see, he only asks because the programme is designed properly. It's not the programme. The programme makes you tired. Not too tired.
Sam has been with him for 10 years, five of them spent in the solitude of a single scull boat, the last couple of seasons in a lightweight double with Gearóid Towey.
Or Gags.
Ten years and he has never been stupid enough to have a conflict with Thor. He knows what would happen. If Sam didn't agree with Thor he'd say, fine, off you go Sam and do it your way. He'd leave the door open. Sam would be back.
Thor's seen enough to know.
Sam fears disappointing him. Lately, when he's on the river and the pain is searing he's come to realise that a big motivating factor is just the eagerness to repay the confidence Thor Nilsen has invested.
"At least I think the confidence is there. He'll say he doesn't have confidence in me, but I think he has. It's more personal than anything else. He's one of the reasons I row."
Pure Thor. What they share and what extends from Sam, through Gags and through Sinéad Jennings and through the rest of the Irish rowers here as they go about their daily grind, is a view of sport and its context.
Rowing is important. Exams, education and future are way more important. The type of person you are matters more than any medals you might win. Thor Nilsen has been at every Olympics since 1952. What they do in Athens won't amount to a hill of beans to him. If they can't provide for themselves and live usefully within society afterwards he'll feel he has let them down.
Life lessons. Number One. Sam Lynch believes the biggest limitation on anything you do is yourself and your preconceptions. In 2000, he finished second in the World Championships in Zagreb. He grasped the race and let it go again. At half-way the race was his. The Czech Michal Vabrousek, one cocky bastard, realised that Sam didn't believe. He timed everything beautifully. Won by less than half a second. If the race were three strokes longer he would have lost. It wasn't.
And Sam realised later that he had been more afraid of losing than he had been intent on winning. Everyone made a fuss and he smiled on all who smiled, but inside he was shredded.
The following year at the World Championships in Munich Vabrousek presented Sam with a photograph of them both. Sam is 6 ft 3 ins but Vabrousek loomed over him in the photo. That was because he was standing in the gold medal spot on the World Championship rostrum and Sam was standing down below in silver position. Silly boy. He'd handed Sam a 6x4 snap of motivation.
Sam spoke to Thor just before the final. Still seething.
"Well Sam, have you a plan?"
"Yeah. I'm either going to come first or come last."
"Anything I can do to dissuade you from that course of action?"
"No Thor."
"I didn't think so."
Sam went off knowing he had to win. Had to.
It's always been the same between them. Sam rowed in a four in the Atlanta Olympics. There were tensions in the boat and afterwards Irish rowing itself was a little listless. Sam, who has since identified himself as the common denominator in most bickering boats, got into a single scull craft where he could only bicker with himself and he fell in love.
Nilsen doesn't view people as nationalities, and even though his links with Irish rowing grew weak at that time he continued to work with Lynch. The partnership brought the lightweight world titles of 2001 and 2002 and would have brought more if the Olympic schedule didn't persist in not making room for lightweight singles.
So now he shares a boat and a room and a life with Gearóid Towey. Two men in boat. Or rather, three. Thor's philosophy goes with them all the time.
That they are best friends is great but unimportant. Thor wouldn't care if they hated each other provided the boat went fast. He won't force people to like each other. He'll suggest that they be mature enough to leave differences on the bank. Thor has known them both for a long time. They've trained together for a long time. They are two individuals, made compatible by the third man.
"Why would I coach a crew?" Thor says. "I get individuals and any two of them or any four of them can be put in a boat."
Two individuals. Conjoined though. In harmony.
Sam feels it straight away whenever they pull away on the water. He sits behind, watches Gearóid's neck. The boat moves quicker when they sit in that order. Gearóid sets the rhythm. He has a nice stroke, easy to follow. Sam feels they're working three or four strokes slower per minute than they are. Gags will say that was a rate of 36 and Sam will say it felt slower. And they'll smile.
Gags is used to crew boats. He feels the atmosphere like he feels the water on his blade. Sam has come from the world of single sculling and had to leave it behind to find the harmony. At first, even though they'd known each other since childhood, the pair didn't work. Sam would blast away in the afternoons in a single scull, brooding as to why he and Gags couldn't make the boat go faster. Than he abandoned single sculling for six months and immediately they went faster.
Last year, in Essen, they raced against heavyweights just to see how they had progressed. Second to the Olympic champions. They flew for 1,750 metres. Looked like a drunken spider the rest of the way. They knew then they had the potential to make it work.
So Sam spent the whole of last summer watching Gags' back getting smaller and smaller and smaller. They were losing weight. Mentally they were crashing. He's seen Gags' head began to loll a little on the really hard days and knew that he was at the lowest point because when Gags' head would dip a little Sam would be at the lowest point too. The harmony comes through pain and repetition and pain.
"I'd be in bow. We'd be rowing in Belgium, for instance. There were times when we'd start and nearly crash into the finish line because I'd have no recollection of the 2,000 metres we'd done. No realisation.
"We'd come in and be just wiped. We couldn't say our names. We found we lost all track of everything else going on. It's a simple and sublime thing."
They met at a Galway boathouse in 1991 at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning in March. Both had to do a 2,500 metre test on the rowing machine. That was it. They saw each other at the limits the first time they met. They were on teams together every year since, but never ithe same boat.
It's the oddest life. Being 28 and sharing a room. Spending all day with the person you share with. Sam's mother likes to tease him that himself and Gags are like an old married couple. Sam can't count the number of times he's gone into the airport pharmacy and purchased two toothbrushes knowing that Gags will have forgotten his as well. Sam thinks that it's not right that people should know each other so well and not be married.
They've found a balance which keeps them sane, though. Boat problems or girlfriend trouble or personal stuff doesn't get talked about unless one or the other brings it up and makes a point of wanting to talk. Generally they've been together so long that the social niceties have been dispensed with. No need for them. No please or thank you. Sorry. Excuse me.
Say, Sam finishes dinner. He gets up and leaves. No announcement. No wondering aloud what he's going to do. No waiting for anyone to finish.
They know. Communication doesn't cease, but anything extraneous isn't bothered with. Clarity is the objective.
In the room. Telly going. Spanish dubbing over an old film.
"Will you turn that off."
"Okay."
Or sometimes, "No, I'm watching it."
"Well it's doing my head in."
"Okay."
There have been times when they've gone separate ways after an outing and probably they've bitched about each other. Just as a valve. As a rule they leave the tension on the water. There's a wordless code. Coming towards the end of a long stretch of training, a three-week or six-week bender, they know they get irritable. And when they get out of the water they stay together for some reason. On good days they just go their separate ways for a while, but on bad days they cling to each others company until one makes the other laugh and the tension vanishes.
Other days, 12 kilometres out and wiped, one will say, "I hate this shit, I wish I was home," and the other will say, "Yeah," and they'll just drift for a while. Even the days of disillusion come in harmony.
Little things. Only people who share a life and the little membrane of a boat would know.
"My singing annoys the shit out of him," says Sam. "He's cat as well so I don't care about it. He does a horrible, criminal version of Coldplay. I get one line of a song stuck in my head and I sing it over and over again. It becomes an exercise in tolerance for him. Something stupid. If Tomorrow Never Comes. I used do it to annoy the lads. Now it's just habit. Last one was You Can Run You Can Hide But You Can't Escape My Love by Enrique Iglesias. I know that kills him."
On the water the constant bugbear is the boat being down on the right side all the time. Sam knows that annoys the hell out of Gags. Worse, he knows it's his fault. Just an old singles habit. The oars are a counterbalance type of deal and he tends to let his right hand drop which means they both have to row a little out of line.
"Right hand!" Gags will gasp. Sam will shake his head. Shit. Caught.
Mostly though it's good. It's great. At home in Ireland, away from the training mill of Sevilla, they seek out each others company. Sometimes in Spain they'll arrange to meet in town for a coffee. Just to stimulate themselves with an environment away from the rowing centre.
Sometimes when they meet they wonder what Elia Luini and Leonardo Pettinari are doing at that particular moment. Or what Tomasz Kucharski and Robert Sycz are up to.
The Italians and the Poles beat them in the World Championships last year and every blade Sam and Gags place in the water, every minute in the gym, every run in the park is devoted to catching up by the time Athens comes around. They are improving, they can feel it, Thor can see it. Are they improving fast enough? That's the beauty and the fascination.
Thor has a thing about feeling good. By summer they should be feeling good. This purgatory should be history. They should feel good and clear about where they are and what they are doing. The week of the Olympic Games has to be an enjoyable week. Thor tells them that often. Get there and think you want it to be over and then you'll lose.
Come the summer Sam will be detached from what's going on. He knows that good, happy feeling. He'll start to get some of the quiet self-containment which he admires as one of Gags' principle qualities.
"I start to feel good and calm all the time. Everything feels as though I have more time to do it. I don't get stressed by things. If the bus to the venue is late I read my book.
"I like races. I sleep well. There's a sense of harmony about what you are doing. Things are easier to execute all the time. Good days, things go well and things that would annoy you one day don't bother you. I have to feel like that for six weeks. That's where the energy comes from. You don't waste your mental energy on other things. If I don't get to that stage, I'm not as prepared as I should have been."
Lightweights weigh in two hours before a race. The comfort of routine is imposed. Ten years of that and you know and love/dread that time.
They know. They are up from bed three-and-a-half hours before the race. Go down to the hangar, get their kit and their food and their water for after the weigh-in.
Then swaddle up warm and go for a row. Allow 40 minutes of sweat. They weigh in. They eatat last. They stretch. They relax. They lie down and visualise. Half-an-hour before the race they go on the water. It's automatic. It's mental rehearsal.
But those 40 minutes of rowing on an empty stomach? They can be torture, really bad if you are squeezing a little bit of weight. Terrible times. The maximum weight of a lightweight rower is 72.5 kilos. There is a permissible average of 70 kilo between the pair. If Sam is 71 kilos, Gags has to be 69.
Now, 71 kilos is 11 st 4 lb. Sam Lynch is 6 ft 3 in. That's not a lot to spread around such a frame. Gags is 6 ft and has to be under 11 st. It's hard.
They bank on that pre-weigh-in row. Put on loads of clothes and they'll lose a kilo a man. They give themselves a 25-minute window, just in case they have to go back out and lose more.
Come out and you haven't lost the weight and you are on the borders of hell. You want to hear about a happy day? Last year they came in off the water and Sam was 71.2 kilos and his heart was heavier again. And Gags announced he was only 68.8. Gift from God. Divine intervention.
After the weigh-in they'll eat. Bread and jam. That's all. Sam loves butter and won't have eaten it in six months. He craves that race-day taste.
And when it's over it will be over. They hold no illusions. They'll row on, but life will go on. Thor has given them perspective. They are people first. Rowers second.
That thought informs so much of what they do. Sam Lynch, a medical student in Trinity, will return to his studies full-time. Clinical practice begins the day after the Olympics closing ceremony. He intends to be there come what may.
He talks about sport and its context within life and you wish you could put his words into a frame and have them delivered to every young athlete.
First boat? It was an old wooden four floating unsteadily on the Shannon. Brendan Murphy was his first coach and in his childish memory he was the biggest man Sam had ever seen. Brendan died of cancer in 1994 and that gutted Sam, filleted the soul of the whole club. And then brought it back together again. Sam is a St Michael's club man. Fiercely loyal.
That morning Brendan Murphy was in the cox's seat blocking out the sky, his 6 ft 2 inframe almost tipping the boat. Sam remembers Brendan couldn't get his hips fully inside and he was sitting on the back in the murky morning air.
There was Sam and three other kids in the boat and he was scared shitless but falling in love.
He won his first race and never won a thing for years. They'd spend hours heaped on hours talking about rowing and sitting around the boat club telling stories. The club has stories, myths, legends. Sam had them all down, each time getting better with the telling. He steeped himself in it. And theories. It all sustained him.
And as he talks you want to ask him a question. Passion. Reward. Obsession. Things that beg the drugs question. Sam loves cycling but doesn't quite believe it. If a fairy godfather offered him several injections that would make himself and Gags unbeatable, would he bare his ass and take the jabs?
You know he'll say no. Every athlete does. It's the explanation that convinces.
"Hmmm. If we win gold or silver it will be a two-week wonder. In September Armagh might win another All-Ireland or something and that will be the new sensation. People move on. In the end it will be a profoundly personal thing, whatever we have done. You have to remember that. You have to remember that you can look in the mirror everyday for the rest of your life and see a tainted person or you can look and see somebody who got the best out of themselves."
So they don't take the drink supplements which track and field athletes claim are necessary and which just happen to produce all those nandrolone positives. They work harder, much harder than any athlete you know and they eat properly and occasionally pop a Centrum multi-vitamin tablet straight from your supermarket shelf.
They don't dream of money. It's not in their sporting culture.
"Our double has quite a lot of respect internationally. That's nice. Some of the lads would like to be rich I suppose. I love rowing within the context. We have this context that Thor came up with it, the concept of the 24-hour athlete. It has to be a lifestyle. Everything you do is done with your sport in mind, but sport isn't everything. Going back to do medicine will be a conscious choice. I have to take the uncertainty out of the rest of my life. Rowing fits as a part of it, but it's a selfish life. You have to develop as a person too."
So they work on. They do sessions on the ergo machine. There's 15 machines lined up in a row behind glass doors that look down over the river. Everyone finishes at about the same time and they bail for the double doors. People getting sick, falling over, collapsing.
They live for Sunday afternoons. Live for feeling really bad in the middle of the session. These kinds of days. Last Sunday he felt bad all day long. Grinding fatigue.
In 2002, he remembers doing 10 hard days in Banyoles up in Catalonia. Ten days. Last day was a Sunday. Off! He walked into the old town, found a square with arches and shade. Sat down and died. Dead. So tired. He couldn't stand up again. He summoned a taxi. Hotel Meriac, por favor.
The hotel was a stone's throw away. The taxi guy looked at Sam Lynch, looked down the road.
"No."
"Please."
"Okay."
John Treacy once told him that international athletes wake up tired in the mornings. No better for having rested anyway.
Here in Seville, they all went into a bar a little while ago and had a sandwich. Sam Lynch had a small beer with his sandwich. Just thought, I'm 28 and it's January. I can have a beer. All the others shook their heads. MAD! Half a Guinness with a sandwich.
"I really felt like I was pushing it."
Another day, somebody is going to the cinema and somebody else pulls them back. Olympic year! The Matrix could cost you a medal! They work away in the small world of claustrophobic, airless competition. Puking over the sides of their boats. Aching. Trying to beat each other at everything that can be measured.
He is finding the harmony. He and Gags could slalom the boat through an obstacle course without speaking now, so in sync are they. Still, perhaps his temperament is that of the single sculler. That's the sweet part, two individuals. Moulded.
The Guadalquivir teems with fish. Salmon, sturgeon and local breeds like samarugo, lamprey, gambusa. In the evenings the sun goes out as quickly as if you'd flicked a switch and when it does the fish come to the top of the water. He was a couple of kilometres up river one night, on his own, when the sun vanished and the water began to boil with silvery bodies arching in the moonlight. Fish so thick and crazed that he couldn't dip the blade into the water. So he sat there in near darkness, drifting, hearing the world as he'd never heard it before. And thought to himself, there is no life like this, no other life so good.
