Rowing It Alone

By Steven Madden

The only way you'll be having an up-close-and-personal moment next month with Don Smith, America's lone and somewhat improbable entry in the Olympic men's sculling competition, is if all 120 or so members of the U.S. track-and-field team--as well as the gymnasts and the swimmers and the beach volleyballers--pull their hammies. Nike scolds us in its ads for paying attention to Mercedes-driving star runners just once every four years, but for elite rowers like Smith, most of whom live a post-collegiate, hand-to-mouth existence well into their 30s, being ignored by the sporting public is an everyday occurrence.

Which is just fine with him. "Rowing wouldn't be the same if it were on TV all the time and we were free agents," says the Buffalo, N.Y.-born Smith, 32. "It's not about money. It's about dedication and competition and friendship."

It's most certainly about the dedication. While all Olympians own a catalog of long training hours and sore muscles, rowers are renowned even among top jocks for the zeal with which they train. Few athletes have a better level of conditioning, the result of the 30 or more hours rowers spend training each week.

And if Smith isn't rowing, he's thinking about rowing. "You can't focus on anything but rowing," he insists. "I've missed pretty much everything fun that my nonrowing friends and family have done for the past 10 years because it would have meant missing training." Ask Smith--a veteran of seven national teams, including the '96 Olympic eight, and winner of five medals in international competition--about his girlfriend, and he starts to describe how hard it is to maintain a relationship while training. But within 30 seconds, he's back to talking about his workouts. When that curiosity is pointed out, he pauses for a minute. "See what I mean?" he asks.

Smith won his spot on the Sydney-bound squad in dramatic fashion at the U.S. trials this June, just 13 days after he switched to the single scull from the eight-man crew, where he was fighting for a seat. "I figured I had a better chance of getting to Australia in the single than in the eight," he says. And now, frankly, he has less of a chance for a medal since the U.S. eight, world champions three years running, is a favorite for the gold. Not that the more technically demanding single was unfamiliar to Smith. Rowers often train in the delicate sculls--they're an ungainly 27 ft. long, 10 in. wide and weigh a mere 30 lbs. or so--to perfect their technique.

Still, his late decision revealed great confidence in his own ability. And that confidence was rewarded when Smith edged Aquil Abdullah in the 2,000-m trials by a scant third of a second, or about 18 in. over the 1 1/4 miles of the course. It was the closest finish in trials history. Smith has spent the intervening weeks smoothing out his stroke in two-a-day training sessions on Lake Carnegie near Princeton, N.J., and nursing nagging injuries (back, ribs, thigh) accrued in a decade and a half of competitive rowing.

He's also accrued something that the glamour athletes never will. "I have $100,000 in student loans to pay back," he says. Smith has an M.B.A. from M.I.T. and wants to put it to work--full time--when the Olympics are over. "I've subjugated all the other parts of my life to rowing for a long time," he says.

It's a hard, monastic life, all for the chance to compete for a medal most observers think he doesn't have a Foster's-chance-in-Perth of winning, in a sport that most people almost willfully ignore. So will he miss his time on the water? "Oh," says Smith, sounding wistful. "I don't think I'll ever give it up completely. How could I?"