“I never want to see that again,” said Tom George after he and Ollie Wynne-Griffith missed out on gold in the men’s pairs by less than half a second. “We didn’t have the perfect last five strokes.”
This was a polite way of saying that the British pair caught a crab on their third-to-last stroke. Not a full crab, because that doesn’t really happen at this level of rowing, but a semi-crab. In other words, they lost their balance and dug their oars deep into the water, like a golfer taking too big a puddle.
Did it make a difference to the outcome? Probably not, as the Croatian brothers, Martin and Valent Sinkovic, were closing in quickly, trailing by about a length with 350 meters to go. But it certainly ended any remaining chances for gold.
On the commentary front, seasoned observers James Cracknell and Moe Sbihi – three Olympic gold medallists between them – sounded confident in the 1650m. But the lactic acid was clearly building for George and Wynne-Griffith, who had made a slow start in their semi-final but came out flying here.
“There was nothing else we could have done,” Wynne-Griffith said afterwards. “In the last two World Cup finals we made the opposite mistake and didn’t put ourselves in a position to win in the first half and then come back hard to salvage a medal.
“We learned from those two races. We took a risk in the first half. We wanted to grab it by the scruff of the neck. Unfortunately, we came up three or four strokes short. But that’s how we wanted to do it. We wanted to race for a gold medal and throw ourselves into the fight.”
The Sinkovic brothers sang “We’re Number One” as they entered the mixed zone. They are rowing royalty, having now won a silver medal at London 2012 and gold medals at the last three Olympic regattas. Their strategy has always been to wait until the final stages, and they timed their push to perfection.
“The Olympics are a pressure cooker,” said George, who first met Wynne-Griffith when they played rugby against each other as schoolboys. “It hurts now that we didn’t make it in the last three strokes, but we still won a silver medal.”
These two men both rowed in the bronze medal-winning eight in Tokyo, and then chose to take a year off and study at Cambridge, where they took postgraduate degrees at Peterhouse College while training for the Boat Race. They are as close-knit a unit as you can find – with the possible exception of a few siblings like the Sinkovic brothers.
“This has been a hell of a journey for us,” George said. “After Tokyo, when we got into Cambridge, if you had told us we would win a medal in the pairs and be a dominant part of that field, we wouldn’t have believed you after Tokyo. We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved. To do it with your best mate is pretty special.”
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