ROWING: THERE IS something desperately savage about the rituals of rowing. When the Irish lightweight four crossed the line fourth in their semi-final yesterday, they slumped onto their own chests and for those few seconds it was clear their world has just stopped.

And yet they still had to go through a slow, rhythmic warm-down and then carry the boat up the grassy bank and sit in an ice bath.

It was a glorious day in Beijing, clear skies and sunny. The mountains looked spectacular in the distance. Spectators danced to the pop tunes blasted out on speakers. It all looked wonderful and pleasant, a day at the lake.

But for Cathal Moynihan, Gearóid Towey, Richard Archibald and Paul Griffin, Shunyi will always be the place that killed a small part of them.

Sport is full of absurdly overblown language but when you live like a monk for four years, when you dedicate yourself to the torturous repetition of rowing in a tight piece of fibreglass, when you spend so much time with one another, you almost become four representations of one entity.

And when nothing in the world matters but the boat then you have to feel, in the seconds when all that vanishes, that something has died within you.

"The dream is over. It wasn't like we can't row. But we didn't do it," coach John Holland said when he walked up from the water's edge. The Corkman's eyes were welling up and he tried to rationalise it but there was no disguising the wretched hurt of the coach. The bittersweet story of Irish Olympic misses continues.

They finished fourth behind Denmark, France and Britain. There will be no final, no tilt at a medal. Afterwards, Richard Chambers, the Coleraine man who sits in the bow of the British boat, left nobody in any doubt as to the murderous nature of the race.

He threw up shortly after the finish, and after medics attended to him, he tried to speak with a television crew from BBC Northern Ireland about his physical state through the last 500 metres.

"At that stage, my eyes couldn't see. I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't speak. I was all about trying to get across the line in that boat. Just the heart really. It was really warm today."

He spoke softly as if not fully sure the words would form on his lips and then he walked away and doubled over and threw up water on the grass and was helped up by his team-mate Paul Mattick. But Chambers, despite his drained appearance, was in dreamland, with an Olympic final on his mind.

For the Irish crew, there is the dubious consolation of the B final today and then the terminal reality that this is the end. Holland nodded as he confirmed this had been their last meaningful race.

"We had a very quick debrief. They are gone to have an ice bath. It is the end of the road for two of them and perhaps three.

This is their rowing career at an end. This is the Olympics. So they will be retiring. They are very despondent. But give them a while and they will come around. They have to. They have a race tomorrow."

There was no particular point at which Holland felt his crew were struggling. The problem was they just lacked the vitality and sharpness required to push on through the second half of the course.

"It was heavy going," he said slowly. "They made heavy going of it and there was no dynamism to their stroke. I don't know why that was yet. It wasn't the start, it was through the body of the course.

"Our plan was to stay with the field and I think we did that in the first 250 metres. We were maybe a second and a half down on the leaders but it became a heavy stroke at that point and they never got out of it. That life and dynamism that you need to get the zip into it - it didn't come."

"You know, we dreamed of gold. There is no question about it and I felt we are at the pace of it. Look at the Poles - they have got through, they won the other heat. And the Dutch got through - they were behind us. So we were at the pace of it and we didn't row today as we can.

"I thought we would have been in touch with the French at this stage but they were the ones that moved on, and after that we weren't going to get it. When we get to 1,000 metres we normally have a good second 1,000. That is the big disappointment of this.

"There is nothing we left undone. I don't have a reason as to why that was there. I really don't."

The Ireland crew is now a footnote in these Olympics, a semi-final casualty. The Games are relentless and more oarsmen, more dreamers, were engaging the crowd before the Irishmen had finished their warm-down. And at home their performance will be deemed a disappointment.

We have no real clue, of course, of the hours they put into it, of the unique toll this crazy game of endurance and discipline takes.

Their finishing time of 6:13.85 left them just over five seconds down on the third-placed British. The remarkable Danish crew finished first in a time of 6:05.75.

All afternoon, big prospects had fallen, none more dramatically than in the first semi-final of this event, when the highly fancied Chinese crew were just vaporised by the occasion and the exhortations of the local crowd, whose screams of "Chino! Chino!" faded as their oarsmen wilted over the last 400 metres and trailed in last.

The Polish crew, the big story of this event, again took first place, their cause aided by the withdrawal of the German crew because of illness.

That must be the worst imaginable way to exit an Olympic rowing competition.

At least the Irish boys can get on with the rest of their lives knowing they gave an Olympic medal their very best shot.

It just wasn't to be.