All race reports for Mark Crawford
Event: Fairbairn Cup 2001 - Lower VIIIs
Posted as: Mark Crawford
Event Link
The whole process of getting 18 oarspeople in the same place at the same time faced all manner of constraints. Your narrator was still sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow Terminal 4 at 8am that morning, dreaming of pineapples and giant kingfishers. Getting Leakey anywhere these days is no small task. Moreover, the rotting Homerton Aylings - previously used as a punishment craft for naughty 2nd FaT VIIIs (in the manner of Steve McQueee's "cooler" in the Great Escape) - was required to provide a viable floating craft. Whilst I ran up the Marylebone Rd, I am informed that the assembling crew attended to said vessel to ensure that it was
- stripped of its geological encrustation
- beaten about with heavy objects to iron out a few rigging flaws
- inspected for plumbing irregularities
- finally launched with some trepidation.
The crew had an ecletic look to it. Down in the stern, the rhythm section was provided by Messrs Micklethwaite and Ponsonby. Neither appeared - at this stage - to be smarting too visibily from their non-selection for the 1st VIII. The engine room - worthy in scale of the great battleships of Admiral Yamamoto's 1943 campaign in the Pacific - comprised the massed bulk of Messrs Blackburn, Leake, Bevan and Hogley. Up in the bows, equipped with coffee mugs, soft cushions and copies of "Home and Garden", one could find the unlikely duo of Messrs Fisher, G and Crawford. The day marked a return to racing for both Leakey and me - it was with some horror that I stepped back into a boat in anger for the first time since 1993.... The fair Bronwen was given the onerous responsibility of ensuring that this unlikely collection reached Baitsbite in safety.
We buggered about for ages getting to the start. Opinion varies, but estimates of the number of full strokes taken as a crew before the start range from 5 to 7 (although this figure does include air-shots and crabs). One way or another, we found ourselves departing second-last among the massed muppets and talentless tosspots, and left an optimistic gap to a decidely lacklustre Magdalene crew ahead.
And then we were away.
I shall not dwell upon the techical details - or lack thereof - of the 15 or so minutes that followed. It all felt pretty fast to me, but I am reliably informed that this was no super-polished performance. The Homerton Aylings, we also discovered, is also fitted with some sort of speed-limiting, rating-damping system. You can try as hard as you like, but that boat simply won't allow you to rate above 32. No wonder Homerton have never been a force to reckon with. Boat rhythm, though, was very fine - even Leakey was unable to attenuate it to any substantial extent. Before I realised it, we were at the Gunsheds being shouted out by BPBC 1 in their socks. One even had the temerity to tell us that it was "looking good". I see a future in coaching, sir.
The surprise came in the results. The first ever BPBC 2nd VIII had finished 22nd in a time of 14:43.
You can see this in a a number of ways. True, we were 57 seconds adrift of BPBC 1 and finished behind the Crabtree 50-plus-year olds. We were even beaten by crews from Poxford and nearly suffered the ingominy of defeat by Wolfson.
However, Dan's painstaking resource deployment attempts had clearly paid off. He'd had the good grace to drop a number of his better oarsmen into the 2nd VIII to ensure a better balancing of results and no unnecessarily-large margins of victory: a 1-second victory over Boar's Head for BPBC 1 and a 1-second win over Downing II and Caius II for BPBC 2. And whilst we all accepted that 2nd VIII victory shields should only be given to College crews, I noticed a marked reluctance to take our shiny new trophy* round to Downing or Caius during our dinner at Bangkok City....
Roll on Fairbairns 2002.
Event: Cambridge Rowing Triathlon 2001 -
Posted as: The Crawfster
Event Link
Sprinting past scullers and through shitty puddles;
Crippling leg cramps and a flesh wound that stings
These are just some of my favourite things.
Blasting along as a formation comet
Sickly-sweet sports drinks that cause me to vomit
Blood covered Lycra and a sweatshirt that mings
These are a few of my favourite things."
[With profuse apologies to Judy Garland....]
After the BPBC successes of Friday's Fairbairns, Sunday saw BPBC's much-vaunted, long-awaited challenge for the crown of the Cambridge Rowing Triathlon. Buoyed up by their performances in Friday's BPBC 1st VIII (Darley, Backhouse) and 2nd VIII (Ponsonby, Crawford), boosted by some practicing of wobble management and turbo-spinning in a IV on Saturday afternoon and fuelled by a half-hundredweight of Pickard's chicken fajitas, the juggernaut that has become BPBC Multisport rolled on into Sunday's festival of pain...
Could we win it? The question I'd been asked many times in our braggadocio build-up had always produced the same answer. We could, and it would take an outstanding performance from somebody else to to stop us. In such glib comments often dwells a good quantity of truth....
The competition, from the entry sheet and on arrival at the unlikely start point of the Stow-cum-Quy roundabout on the old A1303 Newmarket Rd, looked relatively mediocre, almost disappointing. Our chief opposition, we believed, lay in the Rob Roy double scull of Sideshow Bob and Lloyd-Grossman lookalike, Pete Bance. We'd noticed a couple of "Westminster School" entries at the foot of the bill, but figured that we could rapidly terminate any challenge mounted by a bunch of spoilt, pimply, oily ticks.
Quite definitely before we knew it, we were away on the shorter-than-expected, 14-mile bike leg. Within three cranks of the start we were all over the place as our carefully-planned formation disintegrated in the face of some crap starting by the organisers. However, as the cunning "Diamond with the Spinning Head" reformed and began its Teflon-slick rotations, we found ourselves scything through the field ahead and clocking out a comfortable 25mph into the icy headwind. For Kev, it was just another cycle to the shops. Dan began some serious wheezing after 100 yards but managed to get going properly by the turnaround point just outside Newmarket - just as my legs started to go hyper-lactic. Meanwhile, Clive (hiding in the the capacious vacuum at the back) seemed to be having a very leisurely time of it, and even my attempts to dislodge him with an inadvertently-dropped, Barnes-Wallis waterbottle failed to bugger up his day. We finished the cycle in 35 mins dead, which emerged as the fourth fastest cycle leg of the day. At this stage, Sideshow Bob was closing on us....
Then came the run - down into Fen Ditton and Baitsbite Lock, and up the towpath to the boathouses - a flat, but decidedly sludgy, 7 miles. Here is where we made our real move on the oppo. By Fen Ditton, only the early-starting scullers lay ahead, and we took down more of our "minutemen" with every stride. Behind us, the waddling Sideshow Bob disappeared in our vapour trail. Some more poor Lucozade-loading saw me repeat my Marlow chunder performance, fortunately out of sight of our massed helpers and supporters at the Motorway Bridge (Mr & Mrs Pickard, Mrs Backhouse and Fisher, A. Gay Ingram had failed to appear on the towpath after the FaT dinner...booze? Doris? Bloke??). Clive started some top grimacing at the Plough and wins a part-share of the day's "Toughing It Out" prize for making it home to Goldie without collapsing. Our run time of 46:59 was the day's third-fastest.
More importantly, we had nothing in front of us by now. The oppo, it seemed, lay in tatters behind us. The River was ours to use as we liked (I vomited into it again). At this stage, it could all have gone so horribly wrong. We were all shattered, and now being asked by top-notch FaT cox Alex to row the Fairbairns and back - fast. However, it all held together and we charged towards the Reach at 30-32. At the P&E, I noted that my left hand was feeling particularly sticky and liquid but put it down to sweat, and became more concerned with stabbing pains from my quads that felt more like deep-vein thromboses. We span at ludicrous speed at the M/way Bridge and set off on the final charge home, to cheers from our loyal bank support. Out technique was reduced to that of a threshing machine by Chesterton, but we now no longer cared. We were nearly home. We finished the row in 36:42, the day's second-fastest, and the course in 1:58:41 - a winning time in many years and, we believe, the fastest-ever CRT time in a IV.
My left palm, it emerged, had been reduced to a pulp of skinned flesh. I would attribute this partially to switching sides from Friday, but primarily to piss-poor technique.
There we had it. Nothing finished behind us for ages. As far as we could see, we'd won it. We went super-happy, and I even started to talk of "doing a Blackburn" - ie getting a blade made up for winning a tinpot event.
And then we found out. We'd been beaten by a bloody single sculler. Suspecting a timing error, we enquired further, but not for too long, as we found out that said sculler was James Stephenson, airhead surf-dude "helper" at Westminster School, winner by a huge margin at the Marlow Triathlon and 3rd in his class at the London Triathlon this year. Disappointing as it was, it was a fair cop. It HAD taken an outstanding performance to beat us. We'd even seen off the challenge from the "Westminster" IV, containing GB Lightweight Ian Watson and 3 ex-Blues (who only beat us by a few secs on the row, amazingly). We won hip flasks for the fastest 4x/4+/4- category.
There you have it. BPBC Multisport now goes into its chrysalis to regenerate, but will emerge bigger and stronger in the spring. We'll see you all then.
