Stepping in the Puddles of the Kiwi Pair: Part 3

(https://lottiehedleyphotography.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/the-kiwi-pair/)

By: Abinav Atreya

Our saga of the Kiwi Pair comes to an end. The last stretch to the 2012 London Olympics is now underway. 

“Dick’s blow up wasn’t the only moment in 2011 that illustrated the intensity of the sport. Before the trials, I had told the selectors that Jackie was pregnant, something which in any other sport would have been cause for celebration. Not in rowing. We were in breach of the unspoken contract: rowing requires your life, all of it, and all the time. Under no circumstances does anything else get in the way.”

Eric Murray now found himself in an extremely difficult position. It was the Olympic qualifying year, and he was asking Rowing NZ for permission to see the birth of his son. Worse still, Hamish Bond was mad too. In Murray’s own words, “He was the most dedicated and diligent guy I had ever met and, to him, this just showed how irresponsible I was. He never actually came out and said it, but I knew he thought I should have planned my family a little better.” Murray and Jackie held a meeting with the team selectors, Bond, and Tonks. Murray wanted to sort out when he could return to training, but the selectors didn’t want to discuss it. The meeting turned out to be completely different from what they envisioned, and in fact, they wanted him to quit.

Murray would not back out and insisted on his return. The argument slowly escalated further and further. “Jackie was ostensibly accused of being irresponsible, that the decision to have a child would ruin my career. At that, Jackie had no hesitation leaping into the fray. It was absolute chaos. Jackie was cut down mid-sentence, and talked over the top of. I had one hand resting on her knee to keep her — or maybe me — calm.”

Eventually, the argument reached a stalemate when Tonks commented that the two would be training wherever they were. The discussion paused just enough for Murray and Jackie to leave the room, determined to make Rowing NZ accept that Murray would come home for the birth of his son.

Contrary to the drama off the water, events on the water had been going spectacularly well. At World Cup II, the Kiwi Pair stormed ahead of Germany and won by fourteen seconds, and they also had managed to avenge their close race against the British at World Cup III. Results, at least on the rowing side of things, were looking good for Bond and Murray. 

“A week later, after we had returned to Hazewinkel to continue training, I got a call at three in the morning. Jackie’s waters had broken. It was time to come home. ”

“It was ten o’clock at night when I landed at Auckland Airport. My parents were there to pick me up, and we jumped in the car to begin the 90-minute journey south to Hamilton and Waikato Hospital. A few hours later, I was holding my baby boy, Zachary, having made it just in time for the birth. It was the most draining travel experience I could possibly imagine, as well as the most perfectly timed and rewarding trip I had ever made.”

Murray and Jackie spent a happy six days together with their newborn son, but soon Murray boarded his plane back to training camp, leaving Zachary in the care of Jackie and her parents. He commented that it felt like he was deserting his family. 

Just three hours after landing in Brussels, Murray returned to training. Bond had been rowing in the single (a boat with only one rower) during Murray’s absence, and had spent the week racing against Mahe Drysdale, future double Olympic champion. The pair soon began flying again, feeling better than ever.

The next race would decide if the pair went to the Olympics. “We still had to qualify the boat for London, and every other crew was there to do the same thing. It would only take one mistake, and the last three years of hard work under Dick Tonks would have been for nothing.”

All the buzz at the regatta, again, had been about the British pair. Rumors circulated that if they lost again at Bled, they would be taken out of the pair and put in another boat that had a better chance of winning gold. “We had sympathy for them, despite the fact we had become fierce rivals on the water. That sort of talk is demoralising for a rower, a concession of defeat after putting so much effort into a boat and into a campaign. We ignored the chat as best we could and, sympathy or not, readied ourselves to beat them again.”

Regardless of feelings and sympathies, the pairs inevitably lined up for the final. 

The boats powered out of the starting blocks, the Kiwis again leading early on. The British began their terrifying charge that nearly caught the Kiwis at Karapiro, but this time, things weren’t as close. Murray and Bond were world champions again, with a time only half a second off the world best time. Drysdale had won the men’s single, Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan had won the men’s double, and Juliette Haigh and Rebecca Scown had won the women’s pair. All of Dick Tonks’s crews medalled. The future looked bright for New Zealand. And on top of all that, there was a new dad on the team. 

As the rumors predicted, Hodge and Reed were pulled from the pair and placed in the four. They eventually won the four at the Olympics. 

“There was never a day when I thought, ‘I might not work hard today.’ I didn’t always like training, and sometimes I straight-up hated it — climbing into the boat and slipping my feet into shoes still wet from the last row, or coming down the lake on a long stretch into a blasting headwind, my hands numb and blistered. We called those our ‘championship rows’; they were the ones we believed our opponents would be either physically or mentally not up to. But even on those days when the freezing lake water stung the fingers, and the body ached on its 200th kilometre of the week, I never wanted to button off, never wanted to be anything other than the best. It was the way I was put together; the work fulfilled the goal and the goal legitimised the work. The Olympics were now in sight and, within a few weeks of being home, we were back into squad work on Lake Karapiro.”

(https://lottiehedleyphotography.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/the-kiwi-pair/)

As seemed to be the pattern, Murray didn’t make it to training one day. A deeply annoyed Bond took to the rowing machine, which he said in hindsight “was completely stupid.” By the time he finished, his back was incredibly stiff, and even after a hot shower, he was unable to bend over. 

Bond spent the rest of December and the New Year on the couch and spent the remainder of January recovering his movement. He would spend a whole month out of the boat in the biggest season of his life yet. By the time he rejoined Murray, there were only a few short months left to the games, and Bond was now rowing with a back brace. 

Thankfully, by the first race of the season, Bond had mostly recovered. They, again, won the World Cups by staggering margins. They slowly began to rediscover their synchronicity and momentum during training camp, and time sped across “to London, the Olympics, and the final test.” 

The pair was familiar with the race course, Eton Dorney. They had raced there six years ago in 2006, in a bitter and excruciating race to the line against the Americans in the men’s four. Bond reflected that, “here we were, under very different circumstances, the course at once so familiar and yet so different.” 

Bond had finally removed his back brace the week before, and they had, somehow, gone faster than ever before. 

A few days later, the pair sat at the starting blocks, lining up for the heat of the Olympics. There was a strong tailwind blowing down the course. The pair got off to an unusually calm start. They let the French sit up, and on Murray’s call, they began to move through. An almost magical levitation seemed to lift the hull out of the water through that middle kilometer. By the time they finished, they had left all the other boats trailing far behind and began to row towards the docks. All of a sudden, there was a commotion on the banks. “A man we didn’t know was yelling at us in German, pointing to the big screen. When we turned to look, we had come home in 6:08:500 or, to put it another way, we had just taken six seconds off Pinsent and Cracknell’s record. It was the fastest time in history.”

No crew would touch their times for the rest of the regatta. 

As always, even on the day of the final, the pair executed their start, buried the field at the quarter mark, and crossed the finish line tens of meters ahead. Unbeaten for four whole years, three-time world champions, and now Olympic champions. 

“What was I thinking right then? Same old story. Mainly relief. I would have liked to say I was ecstatic — I was certainly pleased, but I can’t change my emotional setting. I made sure I celebrated, if only because I knew the cameras would be on us and I knew the pictures would last a lifetime. I had to laugh at the irony of Eric starting his celebrations early, with about four strokes left to the line.”

“I could achieve more, but nothing ever again could take away from the fact that I was an Olympic champion on this day.”

(https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/41279/hamish-bond-and-eric-murray-win-gold-2012)

The British crew, now consisting of George Nash and William Satch, drifted over to the Kiwis and exchanged mutual congratulations. Murray and Bond paddled back to the docks, climbed out of the boat, and exchanged a rare embrace. “In that moment, we felt a huge amount of respect for each other and joy at what we had managed to achieve.”

The duo was soon on the podium, medals hanging and flag waving, and it was done. They got a handshake from Tonks, and as they watched Drysdale take a victory in the single, the final words Tonks ever said to them were, “Well, there’s another.” 

Athletes after the Olympics commonly feel incredibly empty. Focusing on that one event for four years and suddenly having it over is a type of emptiness that all athletes, win or lose, feel. As Bond said, even his family shared a similar sense of relief. “They were similar to me in the sense that they were relieved more than anything else. The pride would come later.”

The Kiwi Pair would go on to stay undefeated and win yet another gold medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics, after which Eric Murray officially retired from the sport. Hamish Bond would go on to win a third Olympic gold medal in New Zealand’s Men’s 8 at the Tokyo Olympics. Murray currently renovates houses and works in rowing-related business and development. Bond is making another name for himself in cycling and sailing, and is a father as well with his wife, Lizzie.

From 2009 to 2016, the Kiwi Pair was the epitome of rowing. Across 69 races, every stroke displayed the dedication, sacrifice, determination, and unity that made them such a paramount crew. Nearly a decade after their final race together, their legacy still inspires young rowers around the world to chase the rare unity that made the Kiwi Pair truly great. 

Sources: 

• The Kiwi Pair, book by Eric Murray and Hamish Bond.
• https://lottiehedleyphotography.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/the-kiwi-pair/ 
• https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/41279/hamish-bond-and-eric-murray-win-gold-2012