by Fred Dyson
I
n the early 1930s Adolf Hitler was rebuilding war torn Germany and telling the world that the Aryan race was superior to all others. Germany was the host of the 1936 Olympic Games. Hitler believed – and trained German athletes to demonstrate to prove – that they were the best people in the world.
Jesse Owens caused poor Adolf to have his knickers in a twist and his hair on fire by winning 4 gold medals in track and field. To add insult to injury and demolishing Hitler’s Aryan-supremacy myth, Owens was a black American.
To make it worse for the Nazis, a motley group of loggers and farm kids from the University of Washington beat the professional fulltime jocks from Germany in rowing – and won. There is some evidence the Der Furer was bummed out and furious for days.
The movie of this race shows typical Washington oaring style. They had a very poor start and then settled in to their very efficient style. 500 meters from the finish they were moving on the Italians and Germans. Their coach Al Ulbrickson was panicking, thinking they had waited too long to start their finishing sprint. You see them pick up the pace and effort, gaining the field with every stroke. They won going away. Hitler stomped off the grandstand in a snit.
The unique and perfect technique that Washington oarsmen used was a product of George Pocock, who learned to row on the Thames River in England. He teamed up with an engineer from the University to analyze the most efficient rowing stroke possible. The looked at the sweep of the oar and concentrated on the middle of the stroke – when the oar was mostly pushing the shell forward – and at the most efficient angles of the oarsman’s body and combined them with near perfect oar blade work. The result was the most effect way to conserve energy and make the boat fast.
Washington always rowed with a shorter stroke and a lower pace than all the competition. The Washington team would be rowing at 28/29 strokes per minute and holding their place. For the ending sprint, the U of W crew would go up to 31/32 strokes per minute and surge past the field. I watched the newsreels of the 1936 race and could immediately pick out our team just by recognizing their unique style.
I joined the Washington crew as a freshman in the fall of 1957. The coach was Al Ulbrikson the man who coached the 1936 Olympic team. The guys from the 1936 team came around and the shell they used in Berlin hung in the shell house.
I was too small (6’2” 170 lbs.) to be competitive when the varsity averaged 6’4” and 204 lbs. That year, our varsity beat every team in the world. They beat a Russian professional crew in a two-boat match race on the reservoir in Moscow. In typical Russian fashion, their newspapers said that the Russian team was second and the Americans were next to last.
I hung on for 2 ½ years and gave it up. I was good enough to race against weaker opponents and we never lost. In Corvallis, we got homered like the Olympic boat – we got assigned the lane that faced the fastest current and a spectator on a bridge dropped a bag of dog turds on my head as we went under the bridge.
I rowed in the stroke position and my best friend rowed bow. He wanted me to go with him to the Olympic trials in 1964 in a two-man boat but I could not go. He said that if I had gone with him, we could have made the team. I doubt it. We always planned to get in shape and go to the World Senior Games in 2014, 50 years after our missed Olympic opportunity. Circumstances kept us from doing it and then he died. Maybe we will get another shot in heaven.
Anchorage had our own Olympic champion. Kris Thorsness won the gold in an eight-oared shell some 30+ years ago. She sometimes used my training shell when she was in town. Some other ex-oarsmen and I started a rowing club here that we called the “Anchorage Navy”. I got the Lake Washington rowing club to donate an old 4-oared shell and Alaska Airlines brought it up for us. I think it is still around.
Go see the movie. It is the underdog good guys kicking the butts of the narcissistic Nazis.
Fred Dyson is from Eagle River, Alaska.
