ATHENS 2004/ROWING: Early yesterday morning, Schinias seemed a dubious kind of paradise. For several years Sam Lynch and Gearóid Towey crafted their very existence around the ideal of rowing a perfect race high in the Greek hills outside Athens but on the morning it mattered, their best was a fraction of a second too slow. Keith Duggan, at Schinias, reports

Ireland finished fourth in the second semi-final of the lightweight double sculls. Fourth is the cruellest position of all and this result echoed similarly devastating misses by Irish rowers in previous Olympics.

That the Irish pair possessed the sinew and courage to undoubtedly qualify for the final meant nothing. The small gathering of enthusiastic Irish support that made the journey to Schinias and a larger television audience again witnessed the sorry sight of green-vested rowers bowed in dejection and exhaustion, squeezed out by inches in another tale of Olympic woe.

For most of us, it represented a real but fleeting moment of national disappointment. For the men in the boat, it meant an entire corpus of work, years in the making, just disappeared in the heat vapours rising from the water.

When, after an hour of privacy, Lynch emerged from the white athletes' tents flapping in the breeze behind the water, he tried to make sense of the last six minutes.

For all their pageantry and global family values, the Olympics are at heart brutally unsentimental. As Towey walked quickly away from the arena, a bag slung over his shoulder, the sun did not dip in respect and there was no Olympic hush or trumpet call. Racers raced. Stewards queued for coffee. And other athletes strolled around the enclosure, laughing, still in the game.

"You try to keep your emotions in check one way or the other," Lynch said. "When you cross the line you are in pain and you are thirsty and tired. But put it this way, I will wake up with this every morning for a year. Just that time between when you are fully awake and you are asleep and you will be thinking, there is something I want to change, something I want to change. And I will be looking up at that scoreboard and that is what I am going to feel."

The grand design going into these Games was that this pair, exceptional in their talent, application and confidence, would be the rare glimmer of world class in the predictable litany of Irish disappointments. Because of that, their sudden ejection from the pursuit of Ireland's first medal was all the more hurtful.

It would have been easy for Lynch to seek a cushion and attribute some sort of reason for this loss. It emerged from the Irish camp Towey had been fighting the debilitating shingles virus in the run-up to the Games but as his team-mate saw it they were not in the final for the most elemental of reason in sports: they were not good enough.

"What can you say? We came here to make the final and we didn't. It is just not a situation we imagined. We are devastated, both of us. We had a good row, like. Nothing went wrong in preparation and it was a fast time for us and we just got beaten by three fast crews. I honestly don't think we could have done any better. We have no excuses or reasons other than three crews were faster than us.

"And that's a really hard pill to swallow but it is all I can give."

From the beginning, when all six boats edged to and fro in a scramble for leading territory, nosing like starving pups seeking a feed, the race felt treacherous. When the French team, rowing with the serenity and pace of a morning training session, pulled out ahead in lane four, the Irish were effectively fighting for the remaining two spots.

They held third position through the middle 1,000 metres but the competition refused to thin out during that long and crucial section. Only the Italian pair of Elia Luini and Leonardo Pettinari, for years the unrivalled masters in this event, faded into obscurity as the race, though not especially quick, settled into an out and out conflict of body and soul over the last 500 metres.

That final quarter was torturous, with Lynch's head moving from side to side as he realised the danger materialising at either side of the Irish oars. The Hungarian team worked voodoo on their fortunes after dropping to fifth on the halfway point, putting in the fastest 500 metres (1.33.36) of the race to that point and accelerating again over the last 500 metres. That left the Japanese, vying with Ireland in lane five, with never more than inches between them.

"We just couldn't drop the Japanese. We got our nose ahead but they doggedly stuck to it and they got us on the line. I wasn't sure who got it crossing," said Lynch.

It was clear though, as we watched, the Irish were doomed during those savage last few seconds, close enough to the standard to harbour a lifetime of regrets but locked on the wrong side of a white-knuckle struggle against the unyielding Japanese.

Elimination could be the only outcome and as they crossed the line, they must have heard the groan that has accompanied other Irish rowers on a day of unfulfilled promise.

But in a long and eloquent rumination afterwards, Lynch spelled out the way in which rowers are different than other sports people. They are a species of existentialists. Although numb inside, Lynch refused to be overtaken by the occasion and vowed he and Towey would be back on the starting line tomorrow for the B final, a consolation more bitter than sweet.

"People will say the B final doesn't matter that much. But I am not going to disrespect my selection and my country by not preparing for it properly. Like, the prima donnas are the ones going around saying, 'ah, we should be in the final'. Well, we are not in the final so we should not be in the final."

And that was the unarguable racer's logic, as flat and shining as the water that will always now hold a very deep and personal piece of his heart.