WORLD ROWING CHAMPIONSHIPS

Crazy eights, meagre weights

Here’s the skinny on Canada’s lightweight men’s eight: Don’t get in their way, don’t offer to feed them after Saturday, and don’t assume they’re a boring bunch.

The Canadian lightweight men’s eight manage to avoid hitting anyone, or anything, on their way to second place in their qualifying heat at the World Rowing championships in St. Catharines, Ont., yesterday.

By Dave Feschuk

ST. CATHARINES, ONT. At, first they were simply embarrassed; they were supposed to be upholders of Canada’s proud rowing reputation, so there was no excusing their hit-and- run rap sheet.

Canada's lightweight eight went on a world-class collision spree this sum- mer. They rammed buoys and stakes and docks like drunken cottagers. They brushed bridges and sank competitors like they were playing a game of Battleship. On one fateful afternoon in June, they ran into a couple of American scullers in a fullspeed, head-on smack-up that shattered the Yankee shell and left the Canadians more than a little sheepish. Not only were they embarrassed; they had nearly impaled two innocent men.

"At this level, that's not really acceptable," says crewmember Anthony Shearing, a 30-year-old Toronto doctor. "We had to make a change."

And so they made a rare move: They fired their coxswain (but not before he steered them into a large orange buoy a week later). And ever since they urged world champion helmsman Pat Newman out of retirement and into their shell, they've been charting an unusually straight path on their way to this weeks World Rowing Championships.

This is something of an unusual crew, made up of a doctor whose wife is expecting next Monday, the day after the championships conclude; of a firefighter with three kids of his own, whose colleagues are working his shifts so he won’t miss a paycheque; of a red-headed Russian-speaker from the Yukon; of a bunch of guys who’ve begged and borrowed and basically starved themselves this summer, all for the love of a sport where the payoff isn't millions of dollars - where it maybe isn’t even a medal.

Because of the zaniness of their quest somebody dubbed this crew the Crazy Eights a while back. And they'd be lying if they said they didn’t like the tag.

"I look at it like this," says Ben Storey, 25, the redheaded Whitehorse native who once spent a year in Russia. "This is probably the only time in my life where I'm going to be this good at something, to be world-class. After this, I'm going to settle into a life of mediocrity like everybody else. So I might as well put everything I have into it and enjoy it."

Might as well enjoy it, even if it means he hasn’t been able to eat much of a meal for months. In elite rowing, there are two types of athletes. There are the thoroughbred specimens with the football-player shoulders and the hockey-player thighs - the heavyweights. And then there is a group of spindly contrasts, the lightweights, whose fashion-model-thin frames are draped with barely a pinch of cheek chub, just veins and bones and lean, lean muscle.

To qualify for a men’s lightweight race, a crew must weigh in at an average of 70 kilograms apiece just two hours before the race. That's 154.4 pounds, which is probably 20 pounds less than most of the Crazies would weigh if they were just slightly better fed. And unlike other weight-class sports in which forced dehydration is used to drop considerable poundage for the weigh-in, the close proximity of the weigh-in to the race doesn’t allow for such an extreme strategy.

Instead, oarsmen must maintain relatively meager weights - maybe five or six pounds over the allowed limit - for the entire racing season. This can wreak havoc on their systems. Female lightweights, the Crazy Eights will tell you, can watch their menstrual cycle thrown into disarray. (Word is, it often completely disappears). And neither sex, to paraphrase the crew's vivid compendium of toilet humor, can call itself "regular."

Says Storey: "We get to experience one of these feelings that people in our society rarely get to experience: Starvation."

Adds Graham McLaren of Victoria: "It makes you really appreciate food. You eat small portions, so you have to sort of savour every bite. Like, mmm, this noodle tastes so good."

They've also suffered their share of financial hunger. Rowing Canada, which governs the sport in this country, channels most of its money to crews that compete in Olympic events. But since the lightweight eight isn’t on the five-ringed calendar, the Crazy Eights had to raise the cash for their all-important European sojourn in June and July.

Indeed, if they hadn't gone to England and Switzerland - where, aside from their run-in with the U.S. crew, they put up some impressive results against top-flight competition - they wouldn’t have been able to prove their world-class worthiness. And so they accepted the charity of many kind souls; of a Canadian foundation run by Silken Laumann’s husband that handed them $5,000; of Swiss billets who offered them room and (barely touched) board; and, funny enough, of the two Americans whose shell they'd recently destroyed, who were generous enough not to object when the mangy-manned Canadians hitched a ride in a U.S. convoy from Zurich to Lucerne.

They also held a keg party at their training base of London, Ont., which only earned them $300, but left them with some priceless memories of their hyper-disciplined peers cutting loose after a rough weekend of speed trials.

"I haven’t seen that many high-performance athletes that blotto in my life," says Ed Winchester, 28, of Rothesay, N.B., whose other boatmates include Jeff Jay, Erik Oinonen, Matt McCarthy and Dave Boyes. "And I mean, myself included."

There will likely be a party after the Crazy Eights finish their last race at the world championships - after finishing second yesterday to the Americans, they were seconded into tomorrows repechage in which they’d need a top-four finish to make Saturday's final - but there are also serious matters of more immediacy.

Boyes, at 35 the crew’s oldest member, will be punching in for a shift with the St. Catharines Fire Department, where his kind colleagues have been donating man-hours to help a home-town boy race at a hometown championship.

Dr. Shearing will be making tracks for a Toronto delivery room (although has promised his crewmates that if the baby arrives after nine o'clock on the night before a race, he'll stay in St. Catharines and concentrate on rowing).

And crew members one and all will be eating and eating and eating, waking up the next day to a reminder that, as McLaren noted the other day, "a food hangover is just as bad as an alcohol hangover if you binge like we’ll be bingeing."