No reward and little relief in the pain game

"They tell us not to worry about the pain. You faint before you die."

-- Neville Maxwell.

JOHN HOLLAND is hunched over the handle bars of his boneshaking black Raleigh, the mudguards rattling out a cracking tempo along the tow path at Islandbridge. Up left, down right. That's how it works on the water. Up on the left, down on the right. The path is buzzing with coaches on bikes mapping the pull and lurch of every stroke in their boat. Here Holland lives on his wits, inches from the river, eyeing his strokemeter, barking to his four man crew.

"Hold your station ... Bit more reach Tony... This way.... More this way... Okay... Keep it going... Whooaa, slow ....... Whooaaaa, Whooaaaaaaah."

A two man boat is heading down the river on the left. Another crew are going up on the right. Further down, another vessel with eight on board like a scooped length of pointed wavin piping is doing a three point turn, the hull caught up in some reeds.

Another crew of four gliding down stream at full pelt jam on the brakes, their blades skiing into the water like landing swans, to stop themselves from slicing the turning boat in half.

The crew manages to stop the boat. Heads are hanging, the rowers half knackered, totally frustrated, too stunned by the novices' incompetence to utter even a single word of abuse.

"Look at them. They're all over the place," mutters Irish rowing coach Holland. "You get that this time of year."

The arc of work is taking Holland's four up and down the crowded Liffey. By the end of the evening's session they will have covered 16 kilometres. Holland will have cycled the same. The arc of work is the power, how the boat moves. They put the blade in and they pull. When they take it out that is the arc of work. The arc cost them a medal in last year's Atlanta Olympics. The arc was too short.

"If you're pulling a little bit short, it means you're not getting the same return from the stroke. You know from where you put the blade in and take it out. It's like a sprinter running with a shorter stride. What makes you do it, nobody really knows. Maybe we tried a little too hard. You look back now and say, `Shit, we should have had the medal'. But the other three crews didn't make the mistake. We did," says Maxwell.

Holland's four rowers - Maxwell, Tony O'Connor, Derek Holland (John's son) and Sam Lynch - are unmatched on the water in Ireland and in most other places in the world. Four athletes pulling hard against public in difference but making good headway are now looking at the World Championships in France later this year and beyond to the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000.

There are other competitions along the way, but they know what the public appetite is like and how much rowing can be digested. Only Olympic medals will really excite. But they're chugging along now. Twenty hours a week training on top of their day's work. It wasn't always so easy.

Last summer was the summer of the epiphany. They discovered the cost of throwing their hat into the Olympic ring.

Thor Nielsen, technical director of Irish rowing, arrived to the camp one day with a new schedule. Maxwell looked at it and said that it was physically impossible. He said he couldn't do it. Coach Holland looked at it. He thought it was impossible, too. Neilson, who has coached around 200 athletes to World Championship medals in Italy, Spain and Ireland, explained to them the choice. Do it or don't do it. Don't do it, then don't bother.

"The different training meant sprinting 500 metres IS times on a rowing machine. Normally you do five. This was just one of three daily sessions. I couldn't normally have done this in one session, but here it was thrown into the middle of three. We all did it. Everyone. Mentally we had never achieved that barrier before. It was like the four minute mile," says Maxwell.

Rowers are animals for training. Everyone knows it. You walk through College Park midweek and you see them plodding around and around and around the perimeter. When they can't go any further they do another lap. Then they throw up and warm down. Apocryphal maybe. But take the walk through Trinity. It's their nature to push themselves to impossible levels of endurance.

"The scary thing before a race is that halfway through you know you will be dying," says Maxwell. "You just try to focus on the rhythm. It's hypnotic. Over the last 10 strokes you are physically shattered.

"In a 2,000 metres race, the first 500 is like running a 100 dash. The middle 1,000 is like running a 400 event and the final 500 is like the 100 all over again. Your legs go blue. You look down and your knees have changed. colour. But you learn to cope with it. It's mental."

WHEN the Corpo lads picked Sam off the road they didn't know what he was talking about. But they'd never rowed in an Olympic final before. Sam has done it at 21, although rowers normally peak at 30. The Corpo lads didn't know what it was like to train for 35 hours a week, nor understand the complexities of holing up together for seven months with 11 others. Smelling each other, eating with each other, listening to each other's "crap" music, training and tolerating each other.

Vying with each other for a place on an Olympic boat with only four seats was camaraderie and killer competitiveness in equal measure. They picked each other up and they dumped each other. In the end the four came through.

After the Olympic race a rower from the bronze winning Canadian crew came over to Lynch.

"What age are you?" he asked.

"Twenty one," replied Lynch.

"You bastard," said the Canadian. "I'm 38. I'm retiring."

The four have melded their metabolisms, synchronised their fitness levels and lung capacities. They've similar weights, similar heights, similar endurance capacities. They can all row until they faint - they'd probably faint at the same time. It's important to be as similar in the boat as it is to have different personalities. When your knees are turning blue and you're cramping, you need everyone pulling the same. You don't off load to the other three.

"It's not like a football team. You can't carry. If anyone falls dawn in standard they'll be dropped straight away. There's no question," says Maxwell.

Lynch and Holland, in their early twenties, are the babies of the boat. Maxwell and O'Connor, a few years older, have proven their ability at two World Championships before. In 1991, Maxwell was rowing in a lightweight four when he watched 21 year old Niall O'Toole become World Champion. He remembers thinking then that O'Toole was super human.

In 1994, Maxwell and O'Connor won bronze in the World Championships light weight pairs. Ireland said "Well done, lads" and handed them £3,000 for the year. In 1995, they were in second position with 800 to go and stopped. O'Connor's back went into an agonising muscle spasm. It was devastating. But they picked themselves up. Last year the two won World Championship silver 10 days after the four of them had just missed out on an Olympic medal. The pairs event is not an Olympic sport. O'Toole's super humanity, they discovered, came down to attitude.

"Atlanta was an eye opener," says Maxwell. "I was talking to some athletes in the village before we raced and they asked me what I hoped to do. I said, well... to win. They didn't say anything but I could see they were saying to themselves, `you f'****g eejit'."

HOLLAND is tearing down river through a blanket of swarming midges in the direction of the weir. Coming up the river a crew of four heavyweights beat to the tempo of a tiny young girl snapping instructions. "Quarter slide, half slide, three quarter slide, full slide." Around the bend, he beats a path through five shaggy piebalds and a foal grazing the river's edge. It's not a hard session, not the same intensity as last year'. Their lives wouldn't allow it.

Lynch is studying psychology, having dumped engineering and rugby. Holland works for Champion Sports. O'Connor is studying education at King's Hospital and Trinity. Maxwell is an aspiring tax consultant. They don't complain. They pick their moments to socialise.

The black eye is obvious beneath Holland's sweat. He accepted it from a Manchester United fan who didn't like the cut of his tongue late one night. Looking into his socket is like peering into a tunnel with an eyeball at the end. All four are washboard thin and have hungry, bony faces. Maxwell's stretch lycra kit hangs on him like dungarees.

Occasionally they break the suffocating routine for sanity.

"After the World Championships I just went off and got pissed and smoked for a day or so. It's breaking out. After the Olympics we all went on an almighty session. You see these guys in the UK with shaved heads and tattoos. It's just them trying to get out of the rigid system," says Maxwell.

"It's not a case of rowers being mad - and everyone says it. It's the standard. If you want to compete, that's what you do."

This season their aim is to be ranked in the top three. That means getting a medal in the World Championships in the first week of September. It means no back spasms, no fights, no car accidents, no short arcs, no crashes on the river. They know there are a handful of other rowers just waiting for a chance to stick their arse on a seat and row for a metric mile as fast as many athletes run it - 2,000 metres in under six minutes.

Coach Holland will hold their hands along the way. He will be there in the mornings on his bike and he'll act as fog horn, tormentor and coach. He has already taken Maxwell and O'Connor from club rowers to an Olympic final and a World Championship silver medal. He has put two younger rowers. Lynch and Holland, into a boat that made the Olympic final. It's a small jump, but one where many would stumble.

After the race in Atlanta a group came over to Sam and Derek and, astonished by their achievement, said to them: "You just barely beat us in the Limerick Regatta and now you're fourth in the Olympics."

Holland, Maxwell, Lynch and O'Connor are thinking about how far they now have to travel to graduate to the Olympic podium. After all, Denmark, the US and Canada kept them out of the medals just as they had edged out the crew in Limerick. The Irish lads have a gap to bridge.

"Maybe go at it for the next three years. Get the medal and walk away from it. That would be ideal - if we got the funding," said Maxwell, before last week's handout of £12,500 each from the Irish Sports Council.

The funding is in place.