Newly crowned Halberg decade champions Eric Murray and Hamish Bond have reflected on the trust - and incredibly gruelling training regime – that took them to an unprecedented dominance of rowing.
The pair won two Olympic gold medals, eight world championship titles and had a seven-year, 69-race winning streak.
“Before that the longest winning streak in rowing was like 20-something,” Murray said.
Murray said trust and him knowing that Bond would show the way to success were the basis of their success.
“If there are no trust issues, you’re on a really good winner, Hamish knew I was going to train, knew I was going to train the house down” Murray said.
“I set world records on rowing machines just to say mate I am going as fast as I can and I knew Hamish was doing the same.
The pair are back-to-back rowing Olympic champions. (Source: Other)
“Hamish, if you could follow and do what he did you knew you were going to be successful and that’s what made Hamish really good.”
Bond did drily note that winning was a cure all for any issues.
“Winning in itself is the perfect conflict resolution scheme,” he said.
“We were riding that wave for a long time.”
Murray said it was mostly relief every time they crossed the line first.
“You’ve got to look at the sum of everything that went into getting to that point, and you look at those Olympic victories and you go there was 10,000km a year, x number of strokes, x number of hours and you put it altogether and you were actually able to put it together.”
“It’s like 200, 250kms a week depending on what it’s like,” Murray said of their weekly training distance, which is effectively from Aotearoa to Europe.
'That’s your job, that’s it, if you want to be the best, be the best rugby player, you’ve got to train every day, six days a week, that’s how it goes. That’s what happens in elite sport, you have to train at that level to be the best.”
Bond, who is a Commonwealth Games bronze medallist as a cyclist and has hopes of going to Tokyo as part of the New Zealand men’s rowing eight, said talent was measured differently in endurance sports.
“You obviously have to have some talent to begin with but rowing in particular, or a lot of endurance sports, the pure talent is the ability to turn up day-in, day-out, consistently and not have too many ups or downs,” he said.
“Anyone can be a hero one day, but give me the guy who’s there or thereabouts every day, in my observation they’re the ones who succeed and succeed consistently.”
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