“I don’t want to see that ever again,” Tom George said after he and Ollie Wynne-Griffith missed out on gold in the men’s pair by less than half a second. “We didn’t have the last five perfect strokes.”
This was a polite way of saying that the A British couple caught a crab On their penultimate stroke, not a full-blown crab, because that doesn’t really happen at this level of rowing, but a semi-crab. In other words, they lost their balance and sank their oars deep into the water, like a golfer who gets hit with a piece that’s too big.
Did this affect the result? Probably not, as the Croatian brothers Martin and Valent Sinkovic were already closing in fast, being a length away at 350 metres from the finish. But it certainly ended any remaining chance of gold.
On commentary, seasoned observers such as James Cracknell and Moe Sbihi (who have three Olympic golds between them) sounded confident at the 1650m mark, but the lactic acid was clearly building up in George and Wynne-Griffith, who had made a slow start in their semi-final but came out flying here.
“There was nothing more we could have done,” Wynne-Griffith said afterwards. “In the last two World Championship finals we made the opposite mistake and didn’t put ourselves in a position where we could win in the first half, and then fought hard to save a medal.
“We learned from those two races. We took risks in the first half. We wanted to win by a hair. Unfortunately we were three or four strokes behind. But that was how we wanted to compete. We wanted to compete for a gold medal and test ourselves.”
The Sinkovic brothers sang “We’re Number One” as they entered the mixed zone. They are rowing royalty, having backed up a silver medal at London 2012 with golds in the last three Olympic races. Their strategy was always to hang back until the final stages and they timed their push perfectly.
“The Olympics are a pressure cooker,” said George, who met Wynne-Griffith when they played rugby together as children. “It really hurts me that we didn’t get it done in the last three knocks, but we still got a silver medal.”
These two men competed in the bronze medal round of 16 in Tokyo and then decided to take a gap year and study at Cambridge, where they undertook postgraduate studies at Peterhouse College while training for the regatta. They are a close-knit unit, with the possible exception of a pair of brothers like the Sinkovic brothers.
“It’s been a really tough journey for us,” George said. “After Tokyo, when we got to 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 it after Tokyo. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved. To do it with your best friend is something very special.”
