This book follows the whole boat team that won the Olympics as well as their coaches, but it mostly focuses on Joe Rantz. Joe isn’t the most important person on the team, in fact his place in the boat is in question for much of the book. When Joe is introduced, he’s one of the poorest boys on the rowing team, struggling to pay for school and make a living. His childhood was difficult and he struggles to find a place he fits in. He slowly builds friendships with the other boys on the team, and by Berlin they’re his motivation–he considers himself the weakest link in the chain, the most likely to let the others down, and he’s desperate not to let that happen.
Order of Events
(1) Joe’s family abandons him. Joe’s mother died when he was very young and his father remarried. Joe’s stepmother never really liked him, but when he was a teenager his whole family moved away, leaving Joe alone in a tiny town in Washington. This affects Joe for the rest of the book, he’s always searching for somewhere to belong and someone to belong with, and has a hard time feeling like he belongs anywhere, plagued by imposter syndrome and a feeling that he will never be good enough.
(2) The Flawless Freshman season. Joe makes the freshman team, and that boat has a perfect season. They beat California and win Poughkeepsie, and they’re immediately looked at as potential members of the Olympic boat in a few years.
(3) Sophomore JV vs Varsity at Poughkeepsie. Because of their perfect freshman season, Joe’s boat stays together, even though the JV and Varsity boats are usually mixed grades. Their boat ends up in competition with another boat, mostly juniors, for Varsity. The boats switch back and forth all season, but for their most important race, Poughkeepsie, Joe’s boat is demoted to JV. They win, making it look easy, but the Varsity boat loses. This only ups the tensions and makes the question of Berlin even louder.
“In the white-hot emotional furnaces of those final meters at Grünau, Joe and the boys had finally forged the prize they had sought all season, that Joe had sought nearly all his life. Now he felt whole. He was ready to go home” (355).
This quote refers directly to the boys winning gold at the 1936 Olympics, which is what the book has been building to the whole time. There’s a great pay off, from watching Joe go from lonely small town boy to gold medal athlete. It’s also connected to Joe’s own journey of finding, or building, a family not only with his fiance, but with his teammates as well. And there is the acknowledgement of the previous seasons as well, in which Joe and his two closest friends, Roger and Shorty, never lost a race.
Brown mentions on just the second page that Rantz, who inspired this whole book, kept referencing “the boat” as something beyond the physical boat or the people in it, and that this idea of “the boat” was what this book should be about. This idea is continued with the introduction and explanation of “the swing,” when every person in a boat is moving in perfect unison, and the sense of effortless perfection that it creates. The book combines the mechanics of rowing, the Berlin Olympics, the stories of all the boys in that 1936 boat, and connects it with the feeling of right time, right place, all the elements falling into their own kind of swing. Brown teaches about rowing and history, but ultimately more than succeeds in getting across the magic of what it was like to be in that gold medal boat.
This book is easily a 5/5. Going in I didn’t know anything about rowing, but the book was so thorough, while managing to avoid becoming dull or dry, that by the end I understood everything, but more importantly I really cared. From the beginning, you know what’s going to happen. The ultimate goal is always Berlin, always a gold medal, and you know they’re going to get it. This didn’t stop me from hanging on every word during the race scenes, holding my breath for each years’ boat assignments, and finally letting that breath out in the final chapters.
