The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned th

he’d had something and lost it without fully understanding that he’d had it in the first place.

As they sat at the starting line, in the City of Seattle, rolling with the choppy waves, waiting for the crack of the starting gun, with rainwater running down their necks and backs and dripping from their noses, the real question was whether they had the maturity and discipline to keep their minds in the boat, or whether the rage and fear and unce

The economic hardships of the last few years had only sharpened the distinctions between them and the boys they were about to take on. And it had only made their story more compelling for the nation at large. The 1934 regatta was once again shaping up to be a clash of eastern privilege and prestige on the one hand and western sincerity and brawn on

An unnamed coach is reputed to have said, bluntly, “Rowing is like a beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling like mad!”

On one occasion, after watching the Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the sport: “Nobody ever took time out in a boat race,” he noted. “There’s no place to stop and get a satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air. You just keep your eyes glued on th

The Washington boys were rowing as if in a kind of trance now, somehow detached from themselves yet keenly aware of one another’s every minute motion. There was little sound out in the middle of the river, except for Moch’s chanting, the rattle of oars in oarlocks, their own deep rhythmic breathing, and their pulses pounding in their ears. There wa

And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed

Washington had relied on home-built shells, many of which were notably tubby and slow, some of which had a tendency to fall apart when rowed hard, and one of which was so round bottomed and prone to tip over that Homer Kirby, stroke oar of the 1908 crew, said if you wanted to keep her on an even keel, you had to part your hair in the middle and div