December 2001
Retroactive Entry
This is my chance to be like the Independent Rowing News - I don't know about their domestic delivery in the US these days, but whoever they use for international delivery is getting worse and worse. In the last year, I've seldom gotten anything from them within two months of publication. On 9 January 2002, I received the 16 August 2001 issue. It was postmarked in Swaziland on 18 October (yes, Swaziland. I'm not making this up). Great publication, but I hope they go back to whoever they used to use to send bulk international mail.
Even with the time lag, I remain a fan of the IRN. So I sat down and read that issue from four months ago. Andy Anderson, aka "Dr. Rowing," has a great column in that issue about Xeno Mueller.
I have never met Mueller personally, but living in Switzerland I feel like I know him. One of the things I found impressive, coming as I do from the USA where even some rowers don't recognize the names of "famous" rowers, is the level of celebrity status Mueller has among the general public in Switzerland (where most folks refer to him simply by his first name). Since I row, everyone in my office kept asking me about his chances in 2000 for the Olympics, and then also in 2001 for the World Championships. He is regularly covered in the news. At the World Championships last August he was mobbed with signature-seeking fans thirty deep at times. I walked by a security guard - rent-a-cop, by the look of it - who was almost certainly bored and had never tried rowing. Yet he was proudly showing off his tie to his fellow guards who thought that it was quite cool that "Xeno" had signed his tie with a big marker. He looked quite pleased with himself.
The accessibility of our sport is one of its plusses. But it is nice to know that those few who have gained some sort of cult status don't disappoint (and by disappoint, I do not mean finish placings, I mean fulfilling their duty to themselves and to their fans, as it were, to do their best and to remember to thank them for coming out and cheering win or lose).
Mueller is lucky to have so many loyal fans, not just among Swiss rowers, but among his non-rower countrymen (and he shows that he appreciates them and is aware how lucky he is). The controversial interview he gave the IRN last year created a stir here, but most of the non-rowers I met (who were indeed aware of an English-language interview in a rowing-specific US publication) seemed to support him even if they did not understand his comments or did not necessarily agree with those comments they did understand - it was the accessibility, the willingness to speak his mind, the sense that that he cared enough to say what he had to say.
There are not too many other rowing celebrities. Word last year was that Steve Redgrave now commands twice as much in appearance fees as the Queen, which is quite something. While I have never met Mueller in person, I have met Redgrave on several occasions (and witnessed his pre-diabetes consumption at the Leander Club over breakfast between training sessions). There is quite a contrast between Mueller and Redgrave. Redgrave is definitely the quiet one, inspirational in the way he just gets down to work and does whatever it is he has to do. I remember reading an article about him once, in which he confessed to hating to train. But, he said, he hated to lose more than he hated to train, so he trained as hard as he could in order not to lose. I handed that article out to a bunch of collegiate freshmen heading into winter training.
I had the somewhat unusual pleasure of being on the same team as Redgrave once in cricket. It was the first and last time I ever tried that game. I remember, before my team took the field, someone was teaching me how to bowl (that's like pitching, except the elbow is not allowed to bend). Redgrave shook his head in a mixture of bemusement and disgust as I managed somehow to release far too soon and bowl a ball clear over the top of the practice backstop and into the river. He was probably wondering whose brilliant idea it was to take a bunch of American and Canadian rowers and teach them to play cricket and put us all on his team. Somehow, though, we won the game on a technicality.
And on that perfectly irrelevant note, I'll return to the right month.