Mitch Tamkin was nearly crying he was so happy. The former junior-level USA rower came to Eton Dorney to watch the rowing, and he was having trouble taking it all in.
“I have never seen anything as perfect as this course,” he said.
It ought to be perfect. Nearby Eton College, the most prestigious boarding school in the world, paid £16 million ($25 million) to build it between 1996 and 2006. The Olympics were pleased to get use of them for a fortnight, thank you very much.
But as with all of London’s other top venues, it is the crowd that made it extraordinary. Quite simply, England is the birthplace of rowing, and what’s more, it remains the heart of the sport. It hosts the biggest single rowing race in the world – the Thames Boat Race between the Oxford and Cambridge University eights, attended by 250,000 people – as well as the most prestigious regatta, Henley.
England doesn’t just love rowing, it breathes it in like oxygen. That gave each heat – from the last stragglers to the top finishers – the feeling of the Olympic final. The stands were filled to the last seat and the overflow crowd spread down the bank of the course, picnicking and partying and racing the boats themselves, waving Union Jacks.
This is how the Olympics should feel.
