Andy Hay: Trust in the power of the black singlet

If there's a way to end your international rowing career, this isn't it - lurching down the course in Nottingham in the B final of the men's eight at the world championships.

An under-the-weather duel with a weary French crew to decide the best of the also-rans in a soulless 2km concrete ditch.

And then, to really stick the knife in, you see Australia screaming down the inside lane in the A final to win their first world crown in the big boat.

Twenty years on, New Zealand crews are at a world championship in England for the first time since that terminal effort of 1986.

Except that this is a team in the ascendant.

Finals week brings a completely new set of challenges.

The Kiwi crews will know they can't get any faster at this stage. How they perform this week will largely depend on what they have banked from years of endurance training.

This week they've raced, got some confidence and know they're right up there. They'll want to be keeping their rows light and short, making sure they get to the course, get their boats straight out on the water, do their thing - and then get out of there.

At courses like Eton and Nottingham, there's nowhere to hide. You can't escape the gaze of every other crew and their minders and coaches watching from the bank. Any sign of a problem is magnified and the rot soon sets in if things aren't spot on.

The 1986 crew was one of the biggest Kiwi eights picked, stacked with world champions and Olympic medallists. We trained through the New Zealand winter at Karapiro, ticking off all the speed targets along the way.

But there was one nagging thing we never got exactly right.

Every once in a while there was a lapse just as the blades came out of the water and the boat would slip off balance. It upset the next few strokes, destroying that perfect platform you need to be world champions.

At Nottingham, this annoying tic turned into a tremor as we struggled to handle the more sensitive racing skiff we'd picked up in Europe.

Doubts set in and we started to look to the boat as the source of our problems.

It would come off the rack before each row, be measured and remeasured. Obsessive tinkering.

The morning slipped into midday and every other crew could see our desperation.

In fact, the best thing we ever did one day was to load the boat on a trailer and park up beside the River Trent.

We had good long row out in the country away from everybody else, finishing up with a bit of speedwork right alongside Nottingham Forest's football ground.

We almost got our mojo back.

If there's one thing the Kiwi crews can do to enhance their perception of speed, it's a twilight row on the eve of the final.

They'll find the course near deserted. With luck, the crosswind that blows across Dorney Lake will have died and they can get out on the water and swing up and down the track in the dying light and experience the enhanced sense of speed it gives.

Then you know you're ready.

The one thing a lot of our current crews have talked about - especially the gold-medal-winning quartet from last year's championships in Japan - is the power of the black singlet.

In 1982, at my first world championships with the Kiwi eight, we slipped into Lucerne almost unknown and, with two races, gave the rest of the rowing world a huge fright, winning by almost three seconds. By the time we returned to Duisburg a year later, other crews would stop to see what we were doing. We were 10 feet tall every time we put the boat on the water wearing black.

It sounds like jingoistic nonsense, but that black singlet is an especially powerful weapon in an eight.

So while double scullers Georgina and Caroline Evers-Swindell or single sculler Mahe Drysdale may not bring the same imposing impact, they know they've contributed hugely to the legacy and carry its power, too.

THEY'LL be absolutely confident in their race plans, and the great thing about these Kiwi crews under head coach Dick Tonks is that there's little room to be out-thought. They look to lead from the front and let everyone chase them home. You either hang on and win or get mowed down. But you're never left wondering.

It's the way the New Zealand eight of 1972 raced and, till the day I die, I'll always wonder whether it could have won us gold at the Olympics in 1984.

In the two previous years we'd come out conservatively for the first 900m of the final and then monstered the opposition with a rating lift and power surge.

We raced the same way in the Olympic heats at Lake Casitas. But we'd been worked out by the Canadians. They raced the final like they had no time left on this earth. They bolted at the start and held on for dear life to the 1500m, by which time our Olympic dream was dead in the water.

People say no one remembers who came second or, in our case in Los Angeles, fourth.

I do. I know every other guy in that eight of '84 remembers - and you can be sure Tonks hasn't ever forgotten the Olympic gold medal that slipped out of his reach as stroke of the coxless four in 1972.

* Andy Hay coxed New Zealand eights to two world championship gold medals and a Commonwealth Games bronze.