The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

by Daniel James Brown

“Aren’t you nervous?” Joe whispered. Roger glanced back at him. “I’m panicked. I just look like this to demoralize the competition.” Joe smiled briefly,

The girls on the library lawn who had glanced appreciatively his way had had to overlook what was painfully obvious to him: that his clothes were not like those of most of the other students—his trousers not neatly creased, his oxfords neither new nor freshly polished, his sweater neither crisp nor clean but rather an old and rumpled hand-me-down.

Al Ulbrickson Ulbrickson was also the least talkative man on campus, perhaps in the state, legendary for his reticence and the inscrutability of his countenance. He was half Danish and half Welsh by ancestry, and New York sportswriters, both frustrated and somewhat charmed by how hard they had to work to get a decent quote out of him, had taken to calling him the “Dour Dane.” His oarsmen also found the name apt, but none of them was likely to call him it to his face. He commanded enormous respect among his boys, but he did so almost entirely without raising his voice, almost, in fact, without speaking to them. His few words were so carefully chosen and so effectively delivered that every one of them fell like a blade or a balm on the boy to whom they were delivered. He strictly forbade his boys from smoking, cursing, or drinking, though he was known occasionally to do all three himself when safely out of sight or earshot of his crews. To the boys, he seemed at times almost devoid of emotion, yet year after year he somehow managed to stir the deepest and most affirmative emotions many of them had ever known.

He was well acquainted with Ulbrickson’s perpetual solemnity, and he had his own names for the coach: sometimes he was the “Deadpan Kid,” sometimes the “Man with the Stone Face.”

His father, Harry, his dreams shattered, had fled for the wilds of Canada, unable to cope with what he had seen in his wife’s last moments. He could only say that there had been more blood than he had imagined a body could hold and more than he would ever be able to wash from his memory.

The weigh-ins were designed, on the one hand, to remind the boys that every extra ounce that went into the boat needed to be justified in terms of power produced

Bolles’s topic varied each day, depending on factors as unpredictable as the Seattle weather or what particular infelicities of technique he had noticed in the previous practice. Joe soon noted that two larger and intertwined themes inevitably came up in these talks. The boys heard time and again that the course they had chosen to embark on was difficult almost beyond imagining, that both their bodies and their moral characters would be tested in the months ahead, that only a very few of them who possessed near superhuman physical endurance and mental toughness would prove good enough to wear a W on their chests, and that by Christmas break most of them would have given up, perhaps to play something less physically and intellectually demanding, like football. But Bolles sometimes spoke of life-transforming experiences. He held out the prospect of becoming part of something larger than themselves, of finding in themselves something they did not yet know they possessed, of growing from boyhood to manhood. At times he dropped his voice a bit and shifted his tone and cadence and talked of near mystical moments on the water—moments of pride, elation, and deep affection for one’s fellow oarsmen, moments they would remember, cherish, and recount to their grandchildren when they were old men. Moments, even, that would bring them nearer to God.

George didn’t just build boats; he also learned to row them, and to row them very well. He carefully studied the rowing style of the Thames watermen—a style characterized by short but powerful strokes with a quick catch and a quick release—and adapted it to the purpose of racing in a shell. The style he developed soon proved to be in many ways superior to the traditional longer stroke taught at Eton. Messing about on the Thames after formal practice, the aristocratic Eton boys discovered that George and his brother, Dick, although their social inferiors, could be counted on to leave them in their wakes time and again.

feeling the sting of British class distinctions, pondering the difference between how he and his father spoke and how they were spoken to, he decided to put in the effort to learn to speak, not with his natural cockney accent, but with the crisp “educated” accent of the boys they served. And, to almost everyone’s amazement, he did it. His crisp voice soon stood out in the boathouse, not as an affectation but as a point of pride and a demonstration of his deep commitment to grace, precision, and what would turn out to be a lifelong pursuit of the ideal.

Filthy, dazed, and hungry, they wandered on foot from the train station to Vancouver’s brick downtown in a cold, dismal rain. It was George’s twentieth birthday. Dick was a year older. Set suddenly and unexpectedly adrift in the world, uncertain of what they would do next, both were ill at ease in what seemed to them a primitive frontier town utterly unlike the staid but comfortable environs of Eton.

George went to work in a logging camp on the Adams River outside Vancouver, where he soon found himself scrambling madly up and down a mountain, trying to satisfy a steam donkey’s mechanically relentless appetite for firewood and water. After a month of frantically sawing wood and lugging tin pails of water up from the river two at a time, he quit and returned to Vancouver, where he got a relatively cushy job working in the shipyards—one in which he did not have to work quite at the pace of a steam engine. But it was grim, dangerous work that soon cost him two of his fingers.

The Pococks set up shop in an old, derelict shed floating on timbers fifty yards offshore in Coal Harbour and then finally resumed what would be their life’s work—crafting fine racing shells. They set to work tirelessly in their shop downstairs, stopping only at night, to sleep in an unheated room above the shop. Conditions were not ideal. Daylight showed through the roof, and wind and rain shuddered through wide gaps between the wallboards.

When told of the setback, Aaron responded to his sons dryly, “You must remember that Mr. Conibear is an American.”

One error in particular required no scolding. They soon learned that if the blades of their oars entered the water too deeply, at the wrong angle, or out of time with the others, or if they remained in the water a fraction of a second too long at the end of a stroke, they were apt to “catch a crab”: the oar would suddenly and irretrievably become stuck in the water, immobilized as surely as if some sort of gargantuan crustacean had reached up from the depths and seized the blade, holding it fast. Old Nero would keep going but the oar would not. The boy holding the oar would either be smacked hard in the chest and knocked out of his seat or, if he held on to the oar too long, be catapulted unceremoniously into the water.

Facing the stern of the boat, each boy began with his chest bent over his knees, his arms stretched out in front of him, and both hands gripping the handle of his one long oar. At the beginning of the stroke, the “catch,” he dropped the blade of his oar into the water and leaned his torso back hard, toward the bow, keeping his back ramrod straight. As his shoulders came vertical over the center of his body, he began the “leg drive” by propelling his legs forward, his seat sliding toward the bow on greased runners beneath him. Simultaneously, he pulled the oar toward his chest against the resistance of the water, throwing all the strength of his combined arm, back, and leg muscles into the stroke. As the oar came to his chest, and with his back inclined about fifteen degrees toward the bow, he reached the full extent of his “layback.” Then he began the “release.” He dropped his hands toward his waist and pulled the blade quickly and decisively from the water while at the same time rolling the wrist of the hand nearest the water in order to “feather” the blade parallel to the surface of the water. Next, to begin the “recovery,” he rotated his shoulders forward and pushed his arms sternward against the oar while pulling his knees up toward his chest, thus propelling his body forward on the sliders back into the crouched position in which he had begun. Finally, as the boat moved forward beneath him, he again rotated the oar to bring the blade perpendicular to the surface for t...

Joe Rantz noted with mounting satisfaction, there were fewer boys making the climb. And he noted something else. The first to drop out had been the boys with impeccably creased trousers and freshly polished oxfords. At a time when images of successful oarsmen appeared on the covers of Life and the Saturday Evening Post, varsity crew had seemed to many of them to be a way to build up their social status, to become big men on campus. But they had not reckoned on the sport’s extreme physical and psychological demands.

Likewise such men do not commit themselves to SEALs, peacemaking, etc.

There he began to build, with his own hands, a large farmhouse.

Harry rigged a flywheel and generator to the waterwheel that powered his sawmill, ran electrical wire into the house, and dangled lightbulbs from the rafters. As the supply of water from the irrigation ditch waxed and waned, the lights flickered on and off and glowed with varying degrees of intensity.

To Joe the condition of the house made little difference. Once again he had the semblance of a home and a new world to explore. Behind the house there was a meadow of nearly an acre, carpeted in summer with sweet wild strawberries.

It wasn’t long before he found that he had one particular devotee, a pretty slip of a girl named Joyce Simdars—with blond curls, a button nose, and a fetching smile—who more and more often sat next to him, singing along in perfect two-part harmony.

For Thula, though, it was yet another disappointment, not much of an improvement over Boulder City, her parents’ basement, or the apartment over the tire shop. Stuck in a half-finished house surrounded by rotting stumps and wild animals of all sorts, she felt as far removed as ever from the sophisticated life that she envisioned for herself. Everything about farm life appalled her—the daily milking of cows, the ever-present stench of manure, the relentless collecting of eggs, the daily cleaning of the cream separator, the always flickering light fixtures hung from the rafters. She despised the endless chopping of kindling to feed the woodstove, the early mornings and the late nights.

After that, things began to sour once more for the whole family.

Tula's feminine gifts twisted into decisiveness

Thula wants you to stay here. I would stay with you, but I can’t.

Finally he sputtered, “But can’t I just come along?” “No. That won’t work. Look, Son, 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.”

Hypocritical

fear and aloneness weighing on him, pressing down on his chest, pushing him into the mattress. The feeling was back. He did not want to get up, did not really care if he ever got up.

His father had always taught him that there was a solution to every problem. But he had always stressed that sometimes the solution wasn’t where people would ordinarily expect it to be,

He soon found that there was no such thing as spare change in 1929.

When he wasn’t poaching fish or stealing booze, Joe worked at any kind of legitimate work he could find. He dug tunnels under stumps in his neighbors’ pastures and pried them out of the earth with long iron bars. When prying didn’t work, he stuffed sticks of dynamite under them, lit a fuse, and ran like hell as the dynamite sent the stumps and a black plume of dirt and rocks high into the air. He stooped and scraped with a shovel, digging irrigation ditches by hand. With a long-handled, double-edged axe, he split fence rails from massive cedar logs that washed down the Dungeness in the spring. He dug wells. He built barns, crawling around in the rafters and pounding nails. He hand-cranked cream separators and lugged 120-pound cans of milk and sweet cream around dairy farms, loading them onto trucks for delivery to the Dungeness-Sequim Cooperative Creamery. As summer came on, he labored under pale blue skies in the dry fields surrounding Sequim, cutting hay with a scythe, forking it onto wagons, and hoisting it by the ton into the lofts of his neighbors’ barns. In all of this Joe grew continually stronger and ever more self-reliant.

Overtime hours & full throttle vigorous driving on into work (fast food late nights, plumbing, hay baling, roofing, etc) of my own teenaged years; gaining my feet in the world, coexistent with rowdy errings (likewise the presence of alcohol, simple funs of motorcycle, boating the Mississippi).

He ate solitary meals, sitting at one end of the large dining table where his family had previously gathered for boisterous dinners. Each night he washed the one plate he used and wiped it dry and set it back in its place on top of the stack of dishes Thula had left behind in a kitchen cabinet. He sat down at his mother’s old piano in the front room and plinked at the keys and floated simple melodies through the dark, empty spaces of the house. He sat on the front steps and played his banjo and sang quietly to himself.

Joys of Fairbanks cabin life. Solitary (proceeding from Boise's overflowing perpetual presence of friendships), but prolific noiselessness. Simple satisfactions in vitality in a home of my own: a hungry stomach filled, warmth, good books, projects, adventures at hand, pauses to think deeply; and yet a social yearning for what is hoped to come in a return to deep friendships, a wife to behold in this dream, & introductions of the chaos of children to the equation.

I too worked for the McDonald’s corporation as a young man - so much in common

the two would rise and pull as if they were one horse, their movements crisply synchronized. And they pulled with all their hearts. When horses pulled like that, Charlie told Joe, they could pull far more than twice what each could pull alone. They’d pull, he said, till the log moved, the harness broke, or their hearts gave out.

Foreshadowing

On Saturday nights they played at a dance hall in nearby Blyn, where a farmer had turned, with the addition of some strings of electric lights, his chicken coop into Sequim’s most popular dance venue.

The Simdars household was austere, Joyce’s upbringing severe. Descended from German and Scottish immigrants who had settled in Sequim as pioneers, her parents both believed that work was an end in itself, that it straightened a wayward soul, and that no amount of it was too much.

Enid Simdars embraced the strictures of Christian Science, a faith that taught that the material world and all the evil that attended it were illusory, that the only reality was spiritual.

it did not help that since her midteens Joyce had begun to suffer from arthritis, apparently a genetic gift from her father. The endless washing of dishes and scrubbing of floors and wiping of windows was the kind of repetitious work that aggravated the pain in her hands and wrists.

He was hardly effusive with his affection, more apt to cuddle the family dog than one of his children, but at least he always seemed vaguely glad to have her around,

the more she observed how he handled those circumstances, how strong he was, how resourceful he could be, how he, like she, enjoyed the challenge of solving practical problems, the more she came to admire him.

she marveled at and exulted in the simple and undeniable fact that he seemed to care for her just as she was, good or bad.

Slowly she resolved that someday she would find a way to compensate for the way the world had so far treated Joe Rantz.

he knew that Sequim was never likely to offer him a path to the future he was starting to imagine, a future that centered on Joyce Simdars and a family of his own.

It seemed, to Joe, a life of extraordinary ease and privilege, and it confirmed what he had been thinking—he did want something more out of life than what Sequim could offer.

But there was a saving grace. Almost every afternoon now, Joyce got off the school bus on Silberhorn, down by the river, rather than at her home in Happy Valley. She rushed through the woods looking for Joe. When she found him, he always hugged her tight, smelling, as she would remember seventy years later on her deathbed, of wet wood and sweat and the sweet wildness of the outdoors.

How he found them so easily mystified her, but he always told her that it wasn’t a matter of luck at all, that it was just a matter of keeping your eyes open. “The only time you don’t find a four-leaf clover,” he liked to say, “is when you stop looking for one.” She loved that. It summed up in a few words what she most loved about him.

The icy water of the lake beneath them seemed to suck warmth and energy out of them more quickly than they could produce it.

Fall football practices in the mud, cold evenings, rain, snowy game starts & sidelines when the warmups cooled off.

With almost half the mortgages in America delinquent that fall, and a thousand foreclosures occurring every day, it was often sad work as he moved families out of homes they had worked a lifetime to acquire. Too often men stood hollow-eyed and women wept in doorways as Roger loaded onto a truck the last of their possessions, destined not for another home but for an auction house. Each time it happened, Roger whispered a little prayer of gratitude that so far his own family had managed to hang on to their house.

They talked sporadically, mostly chatting awkwardly about their engineering classes. As often as not, they ate in silence. There seemed to be a tenuous, if unspoken, strand of affection and respect growing between them,

She walked up and down the street, her swollen and arthritic feet aching,

My mother, often willingly choosing imprudent adventures with us against the restrictions of her body arthritic body, fused ankles.

Joyce professed not to care, but it pained Joe that he could not take her there.

the Dust Bowl, the second great act in the long tragedy of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Even now that they had stopped rowing, their breathing was synchronized, and for a brief, fragile moment it seemed to Joe as if all of them were part of a single thing,