BEIJING.AUG.7.2008 Lesley Thompson-Willie, left, will be the coxswain on the Canadian women's eight team. She competed from 1980-2000 after which she retired but returned in 2006. Paddlers and rowers at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park. . Various photos from 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Over 30 years of rowing, coxswain Lesley Thompson-Willie has found a way to communicate with the wind and waves. And although she's now 51 years old, she's not about to stop. She can taste the 2012 Olympics.
On Sunday, she led the Canadian women's eight to victory at the Henley Royal Regatta at Henley-on-Thames in England, and she'll lead the crew at the most important World Cup of the season, at Lucerne, Switzerland, this week.
The crew has been together only for a couple of weeks. Five of them are Olympians. Some are rising talents. But Thompson-Willie is the royalty in the boat, calm, collected and the veteran of six Olympics, seven if you count the boycotted one in 1980 in Moscow.
Thompson-Willie hung up her stopwatches and life jackets in 2000 to coach for a while and become a teacher-librarian at a London, Ont., high school. When she made an off-hand remark after the Athens Olympics about how fun it would be to go to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, coach Al Morrow said, "Really?" And Thompson-Willie found herself in the boat again. She hadn't even taken her rowing gear out of the back of her car.
Beijing was supposed to be it, the end. But it's not. "I'm going to try and hang in until 2012," she said Monday from Lucerne. Beijing brought with it a sort of unfinished business. She was disappointed after the crew finished fourth, just .79 seconds away from the bronze medal. Things just hadn't gelled the way she'd hoped.
"I used to say I didn't like being cold and I didn't like being wet and I didn't like being outside," she said. "But I've come to the realization that I like being outdoors. And the feeling when a boat is going really well, it's addictive."
The people in the sport are addictive, too, she said, on those days when things aren't going well.
New women's coach John Keogh, an Australian, says he's worked with other coxes, but Thompson-Willie is unique in her ability to translate what she feels in the boat, interpret what the coach wants, and verbalize it to the eight rowers. "Her ability to understand how the boat is moving in the water, and call things to improve the run of the boat is quite unique. She gets feedback from the waves. She's using all of her senses, her sight, her feel," he said. "I've never encountered that with any other coxswain."
Olympian Marnie McBean once noted that Thompson-Willie warned them of a gust of wind that would hit the boat on the starboard side in two strokes.
"How could she know that?" McBean thought. But in two strokes, the gust of wind hit them on the starboard side.
"Oh my god," McBean said. "She's God!"
Two-time Olympian Darcy Marquardt of Richmond, B.C. - part of the women's eight that is in Europe right now - said the crew has absolute trust in Thompson-Willie's calls, experience and knowledge. "She makes the call and we do it, and it's that automatic," Marquardt said.
Thompson-Willie steered the crew through gusty wind conditions in England last week, when they defeated a British team that won the first World Cup in Bled, Slovenia.
Unlike World Cups, with its six-lane racing, the Henley is a two-boat elimination race, and the key is to get out of the blocks fast. That's just what the Canadian crew did. And then it pulled away from a British crew to win by two boat lengths.
The Canadian crew's task will be much tougher at the Lucerne World Cup this week, where they will face eight other boats. The entry pool is large and deeply talented - it's the last World Cup before the world championships in November in New Zealand.
It will be a long season, Thompson-Willie said, and it's still too early to get excited. All they have learned so far in their short time together is that they have speed, and they can compete with crews that win World Cups. It's enough for a confidence boost, though.
There's no guarantee that Canada will qualify a boat to the 2012 Olympics, and no guarantee that Thompson-Willie will get the job in the Olympic boat.
But she's unique. And Canada knows it.