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No one has done more to restore the U.S. men’s rowing program to its former glory than Mike Teti, the fifty-five-year-old coach of the men’s eight at the London Games. This is his eighth Olympics. His first three were as a rower—an alternate in Los Angeles, in 1984; the bowman of the bronze-winning boat in Seoul, in 1988; and bow in the eight at Barcelona in 1992, which finished fourth. His last four were as a coach. He was head coach of the men’s eight that won the gold in Athens, in 2004, and his eight got the bronze at the last Olympics, in Beijing. When he stopped coaching the national team, after 2008, the men’s eight went into decline, so much so that the boat finished eighth at the 2011 world championship in Slovenia, which meant that it didn’t automatically qualify for the Olympics—the first time in a hundred years that had happened. Teti was brought in to coach the crew for the last chance Olympic qualifying regatta in Lucerne, in May. They won that race, earning them the last spot in the Olympics lineup. (You can see them below on their final day of practice on Lake Carnegie, in Princeton, before heading to London last week.)
From 1920 to 1956, the U.S. men’s eight took home the gold at every Olympics. They achieved an absolute dominance rarely seen in any Olympic sport. Every four years, the top college boats and rowing clubs in the country would get together and race each other, and the winner went to the Olympics and smoked the competition. After a disastrous Olympics in Rome, in 1960, where the eight finished fifth, the crew won the gold again in Tokyo, in 1964. Then the gold medals came to a halt, and forty lean years followed. What happened? The sixties? Processed foods? Eastern Bloc training methods? Doping? In 1964, the U.S. switched from the qualifying format to a camp system, in order to boat up the eight best rowers in the country. But even that didn’t bring back the gold. In the years that followed, the East and West Germans dominated; more recently the Canadians have been the crew to beat, and Great Britain won in Sydney, in 2000, their first gold in the eights since the 1912 Games in Stockholm. It wasn’t until Teti took over the men’s eight, in 1997, that things began to turn around for the U.S.. The Athens crew, in a qualifying heat, set a world record for 2000 metres that stood until the Canadians broke it at Lucerne this year.
Teti (pronounced TAY-tee) is one of ten children from an Italian-American working class family in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, on the west side of Philly. He discovered rowing at Monsignor Bonner, a local Catholic high school, and it took him to Temple University and on to a career as a rower and then a coach, first at Princeton, where he coached the freshmen crew for eight years, and now as head coach at the University of California, Berkeley, while also serving as coach of the men’s national team. Unlike many of the young men he has coached, who learn to row at prep schools and are recruited by the top rowing universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, University of California, the University of Washington—but who one day leave rowing for jobs at Goldman Sachs or Debevoise & Plimpton, where they benefit from rowing’s old-boy network, Teti is a lifer. Rowing isn’t a stepping-stone to something else; if it weren’t for rowing, he’d be pumping gas. He is totally committed to winning, and he expects his athletes to share his commitment. If he suspects some don’t, trouble ensues.
It is not unusual to meet extreme characters in the world of rowing, a sport that requires extreme sacrifices and a high threshold for physical pain. In my 1996 piece about Steve Redgrave, the great British oarsman who won gold medals in five Olympics, I wrote about the anaerobic sensation of “savage unpleasantness” that rowers begin to feel about a minute and a half into the race. A sports physiologist told me that the highest levels of lactic acid ever found in athletes—as measured in parts per million in the bloodstream—were found in the blood of oarsmen—about thirty parts per million. “That’s a tremendous amount of pain,” he said. The article goes on,
Teti is a screamer, and an exceptionally profane one. As the freshmen men’s coach at Princeton, he played a role not unlike that of a drill instructor in a Marine boot camp—Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, from Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” comes to mind. His job was to weed out the dozen or so rowers who might have what it takes to win from the two hundred or so who didn’t. His method of accomplishing this was to be, in the term of art, a ball buster. Not only would he bust your balls on the water, in terms of the training, but he would also bust them off the water, by getting in your head about how tough you were and how much you wanted to win. It wasn’t pleasant to endure—in a great 1999 profile of Teti in Philadelphia Magazine, Christopher McDougall leads with a toe-curling scene at the Princeton Boathouse, in which Teti heaps verbal abuse on the hapless Tiger frosh. But Teti got results. The Princeton heavyweight freshmen hadn’t won a national championship in a hundred years before Teti arrived. (I contributed to that record of futility, in 1978.) In Teti’s eight years as coach, they won five.
Teti has also made it his business to weed out entitlement at the national level. During the decades when U.S. crews dominated the Olympics, a rowing ideal was born and nurtured, which was later codified in books like “The Shell Game” by Stephen Kiesling and “The Amateurs” by David Halberstam. When McDougall, in his profile, asks Teti for his opinion of these books, which are cherished by rowing aficionados, he replies, “It makes me want to vomit. Bunch of whining millionaire weirdos.” The amateur ideal emphasized the values of grace under pressure, fair play, and trying your best—“Have a good row!” your coach would call out, in a plummy British accent, as you rowed to the starting line—rather than the brutal win-or-die mentality Teti favored. To Teti, that amateur-ideal bullshit was the very thing now preventing the U.S. from winning. (For a more Teti-like take on rowing, see Brad Lewis’s book “Assault on Lake Casitas.”)
It is often the case that the best rowers coming out of high school and college—the ones with the best technique, at least—are not always the best athletes, because the best athletes go out for other sports. They’re merely the best of those who can’t make it on the ball field or in the rink. (In countries with fewer competitive sports, rowing gets a better caliber of athlete, which may be why Harvard’s varsity men’s eight this year had three Brits in it, including the stroke—quite a reversal from the days when Oxford and Cambridge loaded their boats with American ringers.) But after four years at St Paul’s and another four at Harvard, these fellows get to thinking they are, in fact, extraordinary athletes. It is these individuals, “You fucking preppies!” as Teti enjoys addressing them, who draw Teti’s most withering scorn. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” is his signature salvo. Teti has always tried to look for athletes outside traditional rowing circles. Maybe their technique isn’t the best, but they make boats go fast. The core of his 2004 gold-medal winning eight was made up of athletes from other sports—football, soccer, hockey—who came from non-traditional rowing schools; Bryan Volpenhein, who stroked the boat in 2004 and 2008, was a soccer player from Ohio State. Tellingly, the 2012 boat has not a single oarsman from an Ivy League school.
So what are the U.S. eight’s prospects this year? I asked Teti earlier this week in an e-mail, after the group arrived at the Olympic Rowing Village, what he thought of the boat’s chances, and he replied,
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, especially from a man who you can see on YouTube saying, “There’s two types of athletes who go to the Olympics—those who win medals and those who don’t. I’ve been on both ends as an athlete and both ends as a coach, and it’s profoundly different. Winning an Olympic medal can change your life.”
But when I pressed him, he would only say, “I believe we have a solid boat but it remains to be seen how they’ll respond under pressure at the Olympic Games.”
Will Teti add to his legend? The eight will race for the first time on July 28th.
To read our full coverage of the 2012 Games, visit The Olympic Scene.
