ATHENS 2004: They ask to meet us by the main entrance, say 11 a.m. Then Sam Lynch and Gearóid Towey walk coolly back towards their boat and the warm-down area. They've just breezed into the semi-final of the Olympic lightweight doubles, and for now leave us to wonder. But wow, they've just rowed brilliantly.
When, at sunrise, we left the city in the luxury, air-conditioned buses for the north coast of Athens and the seafront of Schinias we were already wondering. More like writing them off. Their form was certainly worrying, and all that effort and pressure and great expectations over the past year. Not to mention that illness.
We didn't even know then that they'd crashed their boat the morning before, and Lynch had almost chopped his finger off cutting bread. Sure, if we'd known that we'd have been tempted to cancel the 6 a.m. wake-up call.
So when we meet Lynch and Towey at 11 we offer our polite congratulations, hoping they are totally oblivious to our recent lack of faith. But with only the winning boats from the four heats assured of a place in Thursday's semi-finals, they almost seem as relieved as we are.
And they'd rowed the perfect 2,000 metres. Pulling well clear in the first 500 metres, they'd a full boat-length lead on the Americans at half-way. They finished in six minutes 16.63 seconds, exactly 3.37 seconds up on the Americans, with the Czech Republic taking third.
Those two boats go nervously into tomorrow's repechages, but for the Irish duo it's now three days of rest and relaxation. One race down, hopefully two more to go. The last one for the Olympic medal they so desperately crave.
How differently they must have felt on Saturday morning. First the crash, then Lynch's accident with the bread knife. He can smile about it now, but chances are he wasn't so cool in the moment.
"The crash was just a novice mistake to make," says Lynch. "We were doing a piece and I hit a buoy. The oar flew out of my hand, and it just caught something and tore the side of the boat. So we'd to bring that in for the boat builders to fix.
"Then I went home, and you know the way one thing leads on to another. And I was already nervous by this whole thing. Anyway, I was cutting some bread. And Greek bread is really nice, but it's really soft in the middle and really hard on the outside. And the knife just slid off and took a big gash out of my finger. I fell over and the whole thing was up in the air.
"But we just sat down, and said okay. I had to get three stitches in the hand, but we just asked ourselves how experienced we were. And we weren't going to let a cut finger get in the way. If it happened to my mother she'd just stick an Elastoplast on it and continue on.
"So we went out in the evening to try the boat and it was perfectly fixed. We'd a relaxed evening, then a good session this morning. And sure, you saw the race. We were quite pleased with it."
Pleased seems like a slight understatement. Lynch and Towey had raised celebratory fists at the finish. They'd seen the Greeks upset the fancied Italians in heat one. France and Denmark won the other two heats but didn't look like anything special. Exactly the start they wanted.
Enter Towey, better known as Gags, munching on a large apple. This was the man supposedly finished by a virus earlier in the summer.
"Well, I took 10 days off and got rid of it completely. We went straight back into the hard training, and if I didn't last it that would have been it. But it was fine. And I feel absolutely great now.
"I was a little nervous beforehand, but we were so up for it. We did a practice start and that went great. So we knew we were ready."
With the Irish lightweight fours also easing into their semi-final it turned out to be quite a morning at the Schinias centre. Richard Archibald, Eugene Coakley, Niall O'Toole and Paul Griffin took second in heat three, succumbing to an early break by the Australians - but one that hasn't dented their ambitions of making the final.
They, too, are in action on Thursday morning.
We'll have to book an earlier wake-up call for that.
