Grant Shimmin If you asked most top sportsmen how they spend the morning leading up to their event, they’d say doing as little as possible – which seems like the sensible course of action. But it won’t necessarily be an option for four of South Africa’s finest oarsmen as they get ready to go flat out at the Sydney Olympics. For the lightweight men’s coxless four of Mike Hasselbach, Roger Tobler, Ross Hawkins and Mark Rowand, the spectre of the pre-race weigh-in is one that looms large before every event. The official weight limit is 70kg and, because they are all fairly tall, that’s no easy task. In fact, the quartet confess, they’re only ever at that limit for the weigh-in.
Invariably they have something like a kilogram each to shed on the morning of a race. “I’ve had to lose 2,5kg before,” says Rowand. “You have to be quite disciplined. We’re watching it already,” he said, prior to the team’s departure for Sydney. So what’s the strategy when the scale snarls at you on race morning? “We go for a sweat row, for about 45 minutes, wearing raincoats and that sort of thing,” explains Rowand. Sounds like just the way to preserve your energy for the big race, but fortunately most crews are in the same boat, in a manner of speaking. “We get weighed two hours before the race, so you have two hours to rehydrate,” Rowand adds. By the time they get down to official racing weight, there’s not much fat left on their bodies. “Mike gets down to about 4% body fat. The average is about 5%,” explains Tobler. For the foursome, Sydney represents a chance to put right what happened in Atlanta four years ago, when Hasselbach, Tobler and Rowand were in the boat and Hawkins was the travelling reserve. The quartet, completed by Gareth Costa, won their first-round heat, earning them direct passage to the semifinal, while other crews had to go the repecharge route to qualify. “But we botched the semi,” says Rowand, indicating with his hands the small margin by which Ireland edged them into fourth. “It took a long time to sit down and talk about it and come to grips with what went wrong.” It took a couple of years, during which Hasselbach cut back on racing, missing two world championships, though he continued to train. “It’s hard to give up. We realised what a good team we had,” he says in reference to the time the painful subject of Atlanta was finally put on the table to be dissected. Now Rowand (32) and Hasselbach (31), the two elder statesmen, know they have one chance to complete their “unfinished business”. The quartet narrowly missed the final at the last world championships, winning the B final to be ranked seventh overall, but they are, in their own words “one of 15 crews in the event, of which 10 are in with a shout”. It’s a question of getting to the six- boat final and then hoping everything goes right on the day – when, as in every sport, anything can happen. At least South Africans can know one thing for sure. They won’t be short on hunger when the time comes.