By CHRISTOPHER DODD and JAMES LAWTON
It was the race of the 21st century - and it beat anything the 20th could offer either. A fourth successive gold medal for Matthew Pinsent by only just 0.08s.
Barney Williams, stroke of the world champion Canadian crew who came so agonisingly close to gold
but took only silver, saw a positive through his heartbreak, saying that it had been a privilege to be in the race and that he would rather push the greatest oarsman in the world to a verdict so close that neither crew knew who had won, than win a gold by three or four seconds.
"This race will be talked about. It's not the colour of the medal that matters, but the investment that got us here to take part in it," Williams said.
The story of the race shows that Pinsent, Steve Williams, James Cracknell and Ed Coode leapt into the lead and showed a canvas ahead after 200 metres.
After 500m they headed the Canadians by 0.41 sec and after 1000m by 0.44s.
But then the Canadians moved ahead by 0.51s after 1500m.
With 50 strokes to go, Pinsent looked across and decided to break them with a 40-stroke burn.
But at the end of it, the Canadians were, unbelievably, still ahead.
Ten more big ones were required, the extra gear that crews stroked by Pinsent always claim to have in reserve but seldom engage. They had to now, and the rest is history.
Pinsent, 33, an Old Etonian and Oxford graduate, finally gave way to the emotions of a tumultuous year.
He broke down in tears after bringing his team back to gold in the last 10 strokes.
"I can't tell you precisely what brought on the emotion," he said later.
"It was a whole lot of things, but the closeness of the finish was probably the key. It would have been a lot easier to celebrate if we had won by a bigger margin."
Pinsent's team-mates bellowed out the national anthem - "they sang terribly", he said later - and the man who had already shared three Olympic gold medal performances with Sir Steve Redgrave couldn't hold back his feelings.
When the ceremony was over he was comforted by his Canadian-Greek wife, Demetra, who said later: "I knew all the feelings that were going through Matthew and I just had to be with him."
- INDEPENDENT
