The Boys In The Boat: Nine Americans And Their Epic Quest For Gold At The 1936 Berlin Olympics Quotes
"In a sport like this—hard work, not much glory, but still popular in every century—well, there must be some beauty which ordinary men can’t see, but extraordinary men do."
"Every good rowing coach, in his own way, imparts to his men the kind of self-discipline required to achieve the ultimate from mind, heart, and body."
"Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment."
"Nobody ever took time out in a boat race. There’s no place to stop and get a satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air."
"These giants of the forest are something to behold. Some have been growing for a thousand years, and each tree contains its own story."
"No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it."
"The trick was to recognize a good thing when you saw it, no matter how odd or worthless it might at first appear."
"The only time you don’t find a four-leaf clover is when you stop looking for one."
"If there’s one thing I’ve figured out about life, it’s that if you want to be happy, you have to learn how to be happy on your own."
"In his presence Washington crewmen always stood, for he symbolized that for which God’s children always stand."
"It is hard to make that boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy, of course, is resistance of the water, but that very water is what supports you."
"Rowing is perhaps the toughest of sports. Once the race starts, there are no time-outs, no substitutions. It calls upon the limits of human endurance."
"My ambition has always been to be the greatest shell builder in the world; and without false modesty, I believe I have attained that goal."
"They could have been closer by wishing hard."
"It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for."
"M-I-B, M-I-B, M-I-B!" - A mantra chanted as a reminder to focus on what is happening inside the boat and nothing else.
"A good shell has to have life and resiliency to get in harmony with the swing of the crew." - George Yeoman Pocock
"You will eat no fried meats, pastries, but plenty of vegetables. You will go to bed at ten and rise at seven. You will not smoke, drink, chew, or use profane language."
"Rowing a race is an art, not a frantic scramble. It must be rowed with head power as well as hand power."
"Your thoughts must be directed to you and your own boat, always positive, never negative." - George Yeoman Pocock
"It's most important that he or she be technically proficient: capable of pulling a perfect oar, stroke after stroke, without fail."
"The speed of a racing shell is determined primarily by two factors: the power produced by the strokes of the oars, and the stroke rate."
"Every race is a balancing act, a series of delicate and deliberate adjustments of power on one hand and stroke rate on the other."
"A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six. He must be a total abstainer all year."
"To defeat an adversary who was your equal, maybe even your superior, it wasn't necessarily enough just to give your all from start to finish. You had to master your opponent mentally."
"It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead."
"When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused."
"A boat is a sensitive thing, an eight-oared shell, and if it isn’t let go free, it doesn’t work for you."
"In us Germany burns. And behind us Germany follows!"
"The rituals of rowing, the specialized language of the sport, the details of technique that he was struggling to master, the wisdom of the coaches, even their litany of rules and the various taboos they proscribed—all seemed to Joe to give the world of the shell house a measure of stability and order that for a long time now the outside world had seemed to him to lack."
"I refuse to go into competition for the cheapest eight in the country. I cannot build all of them, but I can still have a good shot at building the best."
"Despite the long summer of work, he found himself even poorer than he had been the previous year."
"That’s our objective." The push to go to Berlin in 1936, and to win gold there, was to begin that night."
"In only a few hours’ time, cold, dry winds howling out of the north scoured from dry fields more than two times the amount of soil that had been excavated from the Panama Canal."
"The dust particles the wind carried generated so much static electricity in the air that barbed-wire fences glowed in the midday darkness."
"Cars careened off roads and into ditches, where their occupants clutched cloths to their faces, struggled to breathe, gagged, and coughed up dirt."
"Within a few years, two and a half million Americans would pull up stakes and head west into an uncertain future."
"Rowing is, in a number of ways, a sport of fundamental paradoxes."
"The coxswain must have the force of character to look men or women twice his or her size in the face, bark orders at them, and be confident that the leviathans will respond instantly and unquestioningly to those orders."
"The team effort—the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat, and water; the single, whole, unified, and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes—is all that matters."
"Rowing at a beat of thirty-six is vastly more challenging than rowing at a beat of twenty-six."
"As the tempo accelerates, the penalty of a miscue—an oar touching the water a fraction of a second too early or too late, for instance—becomes ever more severe."
"Only in this way can the capabilities that come with diversity be turned to advantage rather than disadvantage."
"Life had become all but intolerable for German Jews."
"Signs proclaiming 'Juden unerwünscht' ('Jews not welcome') had appeared over entrances to hotels, pharmacies, restaurants, public swimming pools, and shops."
"Jewish-owned businesses had been the targets of massive state-sponsored boycotts."
"By 1935 perhaps half of German Jews had lost their means of livelihood."
"Men who had rowed with one another for a lifetime had begun to turn their backs on their former crewmates and neighbors."
"In the United States, talk of boycotting the 1936 Olympics had been simmering since the Nazis had come to power in 1933."
"The large Jewish Helvetia Rowing Club had already been banned outright in 1933."
"In every German town and city, signs proclaiming 'Jews not welcome' had appeared."
"Life had become all but intolerable for German Jews since the Nazi Party’s assumption of power in 1933."
"The advent of the Nuremberg Laws marked a significant escalation in the persecution of Jews."
"You couldn’t hear anything except for the oars going in the water... it’d be a ‘zep’ and that’s all you could hear... the oarlocks didn’t even rattle on the release."
"They were rowing as if in a realm of silence and darkness. Years later, as old men, they all remembered the moment."
"Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic had an opinion about what would happen."
"In a realm where the mind might wander, they found a shared silence and a shared comfort."
"Under the moonless sky, they were alone together in a realm of silence and darkness."
"Good thoughts have much to do with good rowing."
"It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison; their hearts and minds must also be as one."
"Heartfelt cooperation all spring was responsible for the victory."
"Every man in the boat had absolute confidence in every one of his mates."
"For a boy who had worn the same rumpled sweater to rowing practice for a year, this was an astonishing collection of sartorial treasure."
"He had never yet been beaten, had never been obliged to surrender a jersey to a rival oarsman."
"Heck, if you want us to row in a shell just lower the Clipper over the side and we’ll row the rest of the way over."
"A boatload of skeletons was not likely to win any medals."
"As they wandered away, Roger Morris gave him a grin over his shoulder."
"That night they sailed up the channel with the lights of Calais blazing brightly to the east."
"They were edgy, anxious to get off the boat."
"To see a winning crew in action is to witness a perfect harmony in which everything is right."
"In the boat, Joe had no idea how things stood, except that he was vaguely aware that he hadn’t seen any boats falling away behind him."
"The only option Moch had left was to hand the stroke off to Joe."
"Moch, startled, locked eyes with him and yelled, 'Pick ’er up! Pick ’er up!'"
"With the playing field more even, and Don Hume back among the living, the boys suddenly started to move again at 350 meters."
"Approaching the final 200 meters, the boys pulled ahead by a third of a length."
"Bobby Moch glanced up at the huge black-and-white 'Ziel' sign at the finish. He began to calculate just what he needed to get out of the boys."
"Moch barked, 'Twenty more strokes!' He started counting them down, 'Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen...'"
"Joe didn’t know what was happening either, except that he hurt as he’d never hurt in a boat before."
"Where is the spiritual value of rowing?... The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a whole."
"Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life."
"When they were sure that they had won, the boys rowed slowly past the grandstands to polite applause."
"The psychological importance of having Don Hume in the boat can’t be overstated."
"It is a small but noteworthy irony that among the first Allied troops who crossed the Elbe River...was a small band of resourceful American boys, rowing a captured German racing shell."
"For my description of life on the Manhattan, I have drawn from Joe’s recollections."
"The crew’s impressions of Köpenick, Grünau, and the German crew are derived from Roger Morris’s journal."
"My sources for the Eleanor Holm incident include The Report of the American Olympic Committee."
"The boys’ extraordinary accomplishment in the 1937 Poughkeepsie Regatta is best chronicled in 'Washington Crews Again Sweep Hudson Regatta.'"
"Laurie was so modest, it is said, that his son Hugh did not know that his father had won an Olympic gold medal until he happened across it in his father’s sock drawer many years later."
"Throughout this time, press reports surfaced concerning the ongoing worries about Don Hume’s health."
"The British assessment that the American eight was 'perfect' appears in 'Chances of British Oarsmen.'"