Fifty years after competing on the Notre Dame Island course in Montreal, New Zealand’s 1976 Olympic rowing squad returned to Lake Karapiro last weekend. Thirteen of the eighteen athletes made the journey to watch the Winter Series, and for a few short hours, something unusual happened: the competitive fire that once burned between them reignited, even as they stood together on the barge.
The 1976 nationals that year had been fierce. Avon, a South Island club competing at nationals for the first time, arrived at Karapiro with a wild American named Gordon Scott, a six-foot-six former oil rig worker. The crew decided to wind up their Waikato rivals by chaining him behind the kitchen at their motel. When Lew Wilson poked his head in to meet the bear of a man, Scott growled at him, pulling against the chain. The psychological damage was done before the first race even started.
Dave Lindstrom still recalls what happened next. “You should have seen the look on their faces,” he says of that moment. The following day, Avon made history, becoming the first South Island crew ever to win the Men’s Championship Eight. But Trevor Coker’s body shut down about 400 metres from the start. His left side simply stopped working. Rather than panic, Coker did what any rower would do: he swung to keep time and rode it out. About 500 metres from the finish, his body came back online. Athol Earl, his best mate since 1971, wouldn’t learn what had happened until after the race.
Coker had won Olympic gold at Munich four years earlier. Now he was heading to Montreal as stroke of the eight.
Petone had also lit up the 1976 nationals. They rowed without a coach, off their wits entirely, and that March they’d won three Red Coat events in a single regatta. Viv Haar and Ian Boserio took out the Coxless Pair. Des Lock and Tim Logan won the Coxed Pair. All four won the inaugural Coxless Four. It had been 23 years since Petone had won a Red Coat event.
The form on display across the three leading clubs caught the eye of Fred Strachan, then Convenor of Selectors. “Any one of them – with no changes – could have qualified for an eight-oared final in a world championship or Olympic Games,” he told the Christchurch Press.
Out on the Karapiro barge fifty years later, the old friendships and rivalries had not dimmed. The Avon crew reminded anyone within earshot about their three-peat in the coxed four that year. The Petone boys, grouped at the back, still carried that same streak of unpredictable brilliance. Grant McAuley, from the coxless four, remained gravely ill at home in Waitara. The others simply watched the current Elite and U23 crews race down the course, their competitive energy finally at rest.
