Double-Feature Video Of The Week: Spotlight on Adrien Hardy and Sébastien Vieilledent
This week's double-feature focuses on one of the all-time great technical crews in Olympic rowing history—Adrien Hardy and Sébastien Vieilledent of France. The above video shows their gold-medal performance in Athens, biding their time and making their move at precisely the right moment, holding off a field of household names (Iztok Cop and Luka Spik of Slovenia, a young Ondrej Synek at stroke of the Czech crew), in the rowing world over the final few strokes.
The second half of the double-feature takes a closer look at that technique—this was among the lighter crews competing in the event, but as Dan Topolski pointed out in his commentary for World Rowing, they allow the boat to continue to glide ever so slightly better between strokes than any among their competition. And by the end of the race, all those inches add up to quite a margin of victory.
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-RR