The lightweight double sculls world champions will rely on speed instead of tactics to stay among the Olympic heavyweights
Mark Hunter and Zac Purchase
There were only 500m to go in the world championship final. Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter, defending champions in the lightweight double sculls, had left it too late. They were going to have to settle for silver. But then what else did they expect? The New Zealand boat ahead of them was unbeaten this year, while they had raced together only once in that time, when they were, Purchase says, “abysmal” and had finished fourth. He had missed most of the season with post-viral fatigue, and had only got the go‑ahead to start training again six weeks before the championships.
“As we sat on the start line we knew we weren’t the fittest or the fastest combination,” Hunter says. Of course they would try to keep such doubts to themselves. But their weakness had been obvious to everyone in the quarter-finals, when they had trailed in behind the New Zealanders. In the circumstances silver was not so bad. But for Purchase and Hunter, not so bad was not good enough. What no one knew, other than the two rowers and their coach, was that they were pulling a rope-a-dope. It was all part of the plan.
Purchase and Hunter normally like to lead from the first stroke to the line. But that quarter-final defeat had taught them a crucial lesson: “We had learned that the Kiwis would absolutely destroy themselves to stay ahead of us,” Purchase says. “And so we played it that way in the final. We were going to sit behind them, going the same speed as them but putting less effort in. It was nerve wracking, the most testing race we had done because tactically it was so different.”
“We let them destroy themselves trying to break us,” Hunter says. “And then we put the hammer down and went through them.” They took the lead with 300m to go, and won by 0.34sec. “In our eyes it came down to who wanted it most in that final 200m. We did.”
Purchase and Hunter are an odd couple. Ask anyone who knows them and you will find that the two men could hardly be more different. They are the Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon of the GB team. “We’re complete opposites,” says Hunter. “I’m the consistent one. I need the day‑in, day‑out workload.” Purchase on the other hand describes himself as “a racer, not a trainer. I can’t think of anything worse than training. I think most of it is completely irrelevant and pointless. I live to race and I rely a lot on that.” Hunter laughs at that, but still agrees with his partner: “He thrives on competition. That’s why I trust him. On his deathbed he’ll be ready to go.”
Hunter learned to row down near the Isle of Dogs, “wading in my welly boots out in all the mud and crap, past the trolleys and bodies in the water, past the big boats that would come by and soak you. It was disgusting”. Purchase was at a “totally different end of the spectrum”. He started at the King’s School in Worcester, going up and down the Severn in the shade of the cathedral. They first rowed together in 2006, on a day so cold that they had to break icicles off the boat. Right away something clicked.
“We are a unique and special combination,” Hunter says. “You can’t ignore that. We have built our reputation by winning the big races, and we have done that because we have complete belief in each other. Even when he isn’t quite right I still believe in him more than I would anyone else.” Now they only want to row with each other. “We’ve tried looking at different combinations and people,” Hunter says. “It doesn’t interest me at all. Now I just say ‘don’t waste my time’. We know what we need to do and how we need to do it.”
In Beijing they won Britain’s first lightweight rowing gold together. In the moments after the race Purchase was bouncing up and down like a kid on Christmas morning, while Hunter was bent double, vomiting on the pontoon. He took himself off to California, where he had a job as a coach at UCLA, while Purchase started partying, and was “burning the candle at both ends”. The ends met in the middle. He burnt out, and has only just got over the intense fatigue that followed. They won the world championship in 2010, but after their disastrous race at Munich last May they had to think again.
“We had a real big meeting,” Hunter says. “I knew he wasn’t well. He did not want to look weak by admitting he wasn’t right. But we have been together long enough to have real trust. I knew he needed to be looked after, to take time out.”
For a while he raced with another partner, while Purchase concentrated on getting fit again. When they joined up again they knew they had six weeks before the world championships “to do something special, something that had never been done before. But we believed in each other, we gave 100% in every single session, every kilometre, every day. That for me was the best six weeks I have ever had.”
That is what told with 500m to go. Two men with complete trust in each other, holding their nerve, believing in each other and their race plan. “That’s when a class combination shows their calibre,” Hunter says. “I remember standing on that podium, looking at how the Kiwis’ heads were down. And that really sums it up for me. They thought it was theirs. And we took it away from them.”
As satisfying as that win was, they do not plan on leaving it so late in the Olympics next year: “If we are on form,” says Hunter. “We will go out and they won’t even see us till they have crossed the finish line.”
Lightweight rowing explained
What is lightweight rowing?
Lightweight rowing was introduced to the Olympics in 1996. Rowing puts such an emphasis on size and strength that slighter athletes were at a disadvantage. The idea was to give smaller men and women a chance to become Olympic rowers, and by doing that increase the number of nations able to compete. There are only three lightweight Olympic disciplines, the men’s four, the men’s double scull and the women’s double scull. When they race the men must not weigh more 72.5kg, and each boat must have an average crew member weight of 70kg. For the women the limits are 59kg, and an average of 57kg.
Does that mean it is less competitive?
If anything it is more competitive than open rowing. There are only six lightweight seats for the men, and two for the women, so even getting on an Olympic team is tough. For the 11 men in Great Britain’s lightweight squad, there are two sculling seats, and two bow seats and two stroke seats in the coxless four. So if you are not in the top two for your position, you won’t make the Olympic team. On top of which, lightweight four member Paul Mattick points out that “A lot more of the population are lightweight size. The archetypal man is 70 kilos. So it is a much broader pool to chose from than if you are looking for the giants, 16 stone and 6ft 8in, who row in the heavyweights. We come from a larger pool and so we have to be at higher standard within that pool.”
How does the weight limit affect races?
“Everyone being the same weight also makes the racing very close because all the crews have similar power,” says lightweight four member Paul Mattick. “Lightweight races can be very exciting. In 2010 when we won the World Championships we were 0.04sec ahead of the boat in second, and they were 0.01sec ahead of the boat in third. There were five crews within two seconds of each other. In a six-minute race, that’s not a large amount.”
Are the rowers all on year-round diets?
Typically the crews spend so much time training and so little time racing that they are four or five kilos above their weight limits for most of the year. “You try and get people as long and tall as you can at 70 kilos,” says head coach Paul Thompson. “But also as strong as you can at 70 kilos.” Two weeks before a race they will start to cut down their food intake, but carry on training. They burn around 6,000 calories a day. “It’s a misconception that we’ll be starving ourselves on rice cakes,” says Mattick’s crewmate Richard Chambers. “It’s more to do with the timing of it, around training, and you cut out all the fatty stuff, like the fish and chips we eat in the off season.”
And on race day?
“We try and stay on the cusp of the weight limit,” explains Mattick. “The heavier you are, the stronger you are, and the faster you could be. But there is a power-to-weight balance.” The crews are weighed in two hours before the start. “It is always a fine line,” says Mattick. “If you are a bit heavy you have to wait for quarter of an hour to have another go at weighing in, and in that time you are quarter of an hour closer to the race. If you can’t refuel enough or take on fluids, because you are trying to make weight, you won’t perform well. We work on such small margins.”
