8 LIVE CREW

By ELIZABETH GLEICK CHATTANOOGA

At night, some of the Eight confess, they have anxiety dreams. Nothing so obvious as visions of gold medals around the necks of the Romanians or of losing the final by the stroke of an oar. During these tense, pre-Olympic days, what disturbs the sleep of a member of the U.S. women's eight Olympic rowing team is the idea of being late for practice--not missing it, mind you, but merely being a little late--or in some other way letting down her fellow rowers. "I had this dream that I was supposed to bring the inside of the boat to practice," says Betsy McCagg, "and I forgot it. So we sat in the boat, but there was nothing to hold the seats up, and the boat collapsed. It was like sitting in a plastic bag, because I had all the parts in my house." Teammates Annie Kakela and Mary McCagg, who is Betsy's twin sister, laugh, incredulously but nervously, at the notion.

The truth is, all the pieces the team needs to win a gold medal this summer are in place here at the Women's National Training Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee: eight experienced, mature, ferociously strong athletes; Yazmin Farooq, their coxswain, cheerleader and sometime nemesis; and Hartmut Buschbacher, their unsmiling East German coach who really does have a warm and fuzzy center in there somewhere. After taking the gold at the world championships in Tampere, Finland, last August, the Eight--Jennifer Dore, Catriona Fallon, Amy Fuller, Laurel Korholz, Monica Tranel Michini, Kakela and the McCagg twins--know in their heart that they are the ones to beat.

But sometimes it is hard to remember, watching them get ready for a practice on the Tennessee River or inhale bagels with astonishing speed during a break, that these young women are Olympians. For in their unstudied and hilarious way, they will talk, or rather riff, about nearly anything: their boyfriends or the lack thereof, the body-fat ratios of the rowers on the men's team, how the Southern Belle paddle-wheel boat will sometimes cruise by them so the tour guide can say, "Off to the right, we have the Olympic rowing team. Take a closer look, ladies and gentleman, 'cause some of them have legs as big as a man's!" They'll discuss anything, that is, but the pressure they actually feel about the Big Day, which is July 28, in Gainesville, Georgia. Still, like the Olympic rings that Amy Fuller has tattooed on her rear end, the will to win is there, if not always in plain view.

Trapped in the lull after April's Olympic trials, the Eight are going a little bonkers. Buschbacher has them on a crushing workout schedule. Seven days a week they get to the boathouse at 7 for a morning practice that lasts until around noon, with one short break. For a few hours in the afternoon the women return home to eat and sleep, then they are back by 4 for a two-hour session. When they are grounded by the weather, they use the hated ergometers, or rowing machines. Their goal at night is to make it into the double digits--that is, to stay awake until 10. "They're probably not in the best mood," Buschbacher acknowledges. "They're training all the time. Training, training, training. It gets boring."

Boring--and physically and mentally punishing. One damp spring morning, as the women ready a new boat for the water, there is much offhand banter involving razor blades and whether they can get Greenleaf, a nearby psychiatric hospital, to sponsor them. In unison--after all, togetherness is in the job description--they recite a familiar commercial: "Are you, or anyone you know, suffering from depression? Are you tired? Worn out?" Yes, says Jen Dore, at 24 the crew's youngest member, in a mock whine: "I'm gonna die. No, really, I'm gonna die." Sometimes, explains Fuller, 28, "our fatigue shows itself as pure delirium."

Rowing, it has been said, looks deceptively easy. It is true that to watch perfectly trained athletes propel a pencil-thin boat through the water, covering 2,000 m, or 1.25 miles, in under seven minutes, is like watching a warm knife cut butter. But look at the athletes' faces, their eyes vacant, their cheeks puffed with effort. Watch their bulky muscles ripple, their backs strain, their unisuits soak through with sweat in an instant. And consider too that during a race, when the women must row at between 38 and 48 strokes a minute, their heart rates hit 190 by the second stroke and stay there. "It just hurts," says Mary McCagg, who as the team's stroke sets the rhythm for the rowers. "Your brain is trying to fight your body."

All this is endured not for the endorsements or for the money or the prime-time glory. No, it really is for that old cliche, the love of the sport, for that thrill of synchronicity. "When the Eight get together," explains Catriona Fallon, 25, who first took up rowing as an undergraduate at ucla, "we're flying." Still, they're also human. They, and Buschbacher, are frustrated by the lack of attention paid to women's rowing, and the Eight are currently engaged in a letter-writing campaign to the Atlanta Olympic committee, protesting the fact that for the first time in a decade spectators--that is, the team's family and friends--in the grandstands overlooking Lake Lanier will not be able to watch the entire race on video monitors. (A representative for the committee confirms this, citing "budget constraints.") As Mary McCagg puts it, "You want to be America's team, not the people who were rowing while the men's basketball team was playing Angola."

Though they truly love rowing, and will when pressed reveal how badly they want that gold, the Eight are articulate about the sacrifices they have made. Their full-time training leaves them perpetually strapped for cash and occasionally searching for the meaning of it all. "We have been doing this forever," says Betsy McCagg, 29, who with her twin graduated from Harvard in 1989 and has been rowing almost nonstop ever since. "My [college] roommate's sixth wedding anniversary is the day of the final, and she's a lawyer, and she's going to have a baby in October, and I'm like, what have I done with my life? Maybe I'll be a nanny for her child." Monica Tranel Michini, 30, who has a law degree from Rutgers and is the only married Eight, admits she regrets the decision to be apart from her husband "every day." To Buschbacher's dismay, many of the women say they will retire after the Olympics. "They say they are burned out," he grouses. "Burned out from what? From being good? From winning?"

It is easy to see why the Eight live in fear of Buschbacher, 38. He coached the 1988 East German women's team to Olympic glory and in 1991 became the first national women's coach the U.S. team has ever had, leading the women rowers, including those in the four- and two-person boats, to take four out of five gold medals in the 1995 world championships. All conversations with the Eight, somehow, lead to Buschbacher; his is the only opinion that matters. When he addresses the team, each woman grows perfectly still; when he follows the boat in his launch, shouting out a steady stream of corrections, interrupted by the occasional, "Ja, that was good," they hardly dare look at him. Every so often, Buschbacher lets his tough-guy mask slip and acknowledges that his team is the best, the strongest, that the race is theirs to lose. But if he doesn't push them, he believes, no one will. One day, as the Eight begin oaring down the river, he buzzes alongside them like a particularly persistent gnat, detailing the flaws in each woman's stroke, moving from bow to stern. When he is finished, he says, "That was just a quick tour."

The women know, though, that Buschbacher is in it for them, and with them. "When we won last year, he was right on the shore, and he already had this beer that was half empty," remembers Mary McCagg, laughing. "Hartmut smiled for 10 minutes after that. It was great." Says Annie Kakela, 25, who is planning a post-Olympic trip to Alaska with her boyfriend, a rower on the men's team: "Not everyone agrees with the mental games he can play to push you to your limits, but I trust him to make me the best that I can be for the Olympics." Michini says simply, "Hartmut is the coach who will take me where I want to go." While they look to Buschbacher for knowledge and often inspiration, the women turn to one another for just about everything else. They are, as another rower on the women's team once called them, "octocentric." Says Mary McCagg: "My mother will say, 'I can't believe the stuff that you guys know about each other, I don't even know that stuff about your father.' We're like sisters now, and we all trust each other implicitly about everything." Fuller, who in 1995 sailed on the Mighty Mary, the all-female boat competing in the America's Cup, agrees: "I've never been with a group of people so willing to put everything on the line to make the boat go fast. I love it."

It should be noted, however, that these "sisters" are also world-class competitors, that to win their places in the boat they spent months competing against one another in pairs, that most of them are more than 6 ft. tall and weigh upwards of 160 lbs. And that things can get ugly when they're not moving water together. "Rowing is the most noncontact sport around," says Betsy McCagg, "so when we get in where we can actually touch each other, all hell breaks loose. We used to play basketball, but we're all centers. You'd get seven people in the middle with their hands up, elbowing each other in the head." During a race, at least, their 105-lb. cox Yaz, who also coxed the team at the '92 Olympics, when they took sixth, is left to sort through the egos as best she can, barking into her headset commands that the rowers receive via speakers mounted inside the boat, to the profound annoyance of the women wielding the oars. "I have to pace them, to see if they can handle it," says Farooq, 29. "Our team--hah!--they can handle it."

Watching the team row, one can get lulled by their rhythms, by the catch, draw, release of their oars, by the sight of eight bodies moving as one. But if the viewer turns her head away for just a moment, the boat vanishes, whooshed out of sight up the Tennessee River by the silent power that is the Eight. And that is nothing compared with the display of force they plan for July. "I think we're ready to inflict ourselves on everyone else," says Betsy McCagg. "We're racers, so that's what we want to do."