OPINION: ‘The Boys in the Boat’ reminds us to root for the underdog

In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler was rebuilding war-torn Germany and telling the world that the Aryan race was superior to all others. Germany was the host of the 1936 Olympic Games. Hitler believed — and trained German athletes to demonstrate to prove — that they were the best people in the world.

Jesse Owens caused poor Adolf to have his knickers in a twist and his hair on fire by winning four gold medals in track and field. Destroying Hitler’s Aryan-supremacy myth, Owens was a black American.

To make the Nazi headache worse, a motley group of loggers and farm kids from the University of Washington took on the professional, full-time jocks from Germany at rowing and won. There is some evidence the Der Fuhrer was bummed out and furious for days.

The movie of this race shows typical University of Washington rowing style. They had a poor start, then settled in to their very efficient form. Five hundred meters from the finish, they were moving on the Italians and Germans. Their coach, Al Ulbrickson, was panicking, thinking they had waited too long to start their finishing sprint. You see them pick up the pace and effort, gaining on the field with every stroke. They won going away. Hitler stomped off the grandstand in a snit.

The unique, near-perfect technique that Washington oarsmen used was a product of George Pocock, who learned to row on the Thames river in England. He and an engineer from the university teamed up to analyze the most efficient rowing stroke possible. They looked at the sweep of the oar and concentrated on the middle of the stroke — when the oar was mostly pushing the shell forward — and at the most efficient angles of the oarsman’s body, and combined them with near-perfect oar blade work. The result was the most effective way to conserve energy and make the boat fast. Washington always rowed with a shorter stroke and a lower pace than all the competition. Washington’s team would be rowing at 28-29 strokes per minute and holding its place. For the ending sprint, the U of W crew would go up to 31-32 strokes per minute and surge past the field. I watched the newsreels of the 1936 race and could immediately pick out our team just by recognizing their unique style.

I joined the Washington crew as a freshman in the fall of 1957. The coach was Al Ulbrickson, the man who coached the 1936 Olympic team. The guys from the 1936 team came around, and the shell they used in Berlin hung in the shell house. I was too small (6 feet, 2 inches, 170 pounds.) to be competitive when the varsity averaged 6 feet, 4 inches and 204. That year, our varsity beat every team in the world. They beat a Russian professional crew in a two-boat match race on the reservoir in Moscow. In typical Russian fashion, their newspapers said that the Russian team was second and the Americans were next to last.

I hung on for two and a half years and gave it up. I was good enough to race against weaker opponents and we never lost. In Corvallis, we experienced gamesmanship like the Olympic boat — we got assigned to the lane that faced the fastest current, and a spectator on a bridge dropped a bag of dog turds on my head as we went under a bridge.

I rowed in the stroke position and my best friend rowed bow. He wanted me to go with him to the Olympic trials in 1964 in a two-man boat, but I couldn’t go. He said that if I had gone with him, we could have made the team. I doubt it. We always planned to get in shape and go to the World Senior Games in 2014, 50 years after our missed Olympic opportunity. Circumstances kept us from doing it, and he later died. Maybe we will get another shot in heaven.

Anchorage had our own Olympic champion. Kris Thorsness won the gold in an eight-oared shell some 30-plus years ago. She sometimes used my training shell when she was in town. Some other ex-oarsmen and I started a rowing club here that we called the “Anchorage Navy.” I got the Lake Washington rowing club to donate an old four-oared shell, and Alaska Airlines brought it up for us. I think it is still around.

Enough reminiscing. Go see the movie. It is the underdog good guys kicking the butts of the narcissistic Nazis. What more do you need?

Fred Dyson is a former member of the Anchorage Assembly from Eagle River, as well as a former state legislator.

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