Video Review: Inside the Race with Marnie McBean (CAN)

McBean’s international career had begun five years prior as a junior and since then she had been working her way up to the senior level. After the two golds in 1991, McBean’s rowing career really launched. The following year she became a double Olympic Champion.

By the end of McBean’s career she had gathered four Olympic medals and three World Championship titles.

Thoughts before the start: Romania was kind of scary because they were big and used to win everything and we didn’t think they were beatable. We’d beaten the Germans (the World Champions) earlier in the season and that was an epiphany for me and Kathleen (pairs partner Kathleen Heddle) that it was possible.

Canada’s women’s four had raced just before us and we’d seen them on the medals podium so we gained confidence from that.

How did the race unfold?: Our target was on Germany. We knew they were excellent racers and we were convinced they were going to do lots of attacks on us. We’d heard they were going to do a big attack and so Al (coach Al Morrow) was going to follow the race by bike and when he saw the attack he was going to call out ‘now’ and we’d do a five stroke counter attack. He called, we counter-attacked and then ten strokes later Al said ‘now’ again. He said it seven times!

I said to him after the race, ‘it was great that you called ‘now’.’ Al said, ‘I never called it.’

Most of our training had been done in small boats with lots of drills. One of them was nine strokes per minute on the square for 2km. Our brains would be fried, but it really helped especially in the tail wind.

You had a big lead. Why were you worried about the Germans? This was our first year of racing from the front. So when the Germans were behind us, I just assumed we’d made a mistake and they were going to come back. It was a lovely naive fear that we’d better keep going.

It turned out we were very good in the second 1000, but we hadn’t figured that out yet. This is how we were trained to race – you just keep pushing. We’d come to expect that it was going to hurt. That becomes the normal state.

Through the body of the race: We were still anticipating Germany to do crazy moves.

Last 250m: The British were coming at us but we now had a comfortable lead. I was calling the race plan and looking for the finish line.

After the finish: I think tail winds are more of a race for your lungs. I remember thinking that was a great race and I remember staring at the screen for a long time. I think it took a long time for it to sink in. We had no expectation to win the race so there was no overwhelming relief. I was just winning another race. I didn’t know what World Best Times meant at that stage. With the tail wind conditions we’d smashed the World Best Time. We went under seven minutes and so did Germany. We really woke the event up. It’s well suited to women’s strengths and everyone internationally had incredible respect for each other. So we trained in a way that had not been done before. The (World Best) time wasn’t broken again until 1998.

We always had the plan that we never wanted to give anyone a reason to beat us. I hated it when other people celebrate a lot after the finish when I hadn’t, so I didn’t celebrate openly.

I remember the French being upset to be fourth and it was their emotions that I used to train through the next year.