Sally Robbins' team-mates treated her with contempt. Photo / Reuters

Sally Robbins' team-mates treated her with contempt. Photo / Reuters

In a crowded downtown bar in Athens, popular with both athletes and, on this night journalists, a group of women brushed past a couple of wide-eyed scribes on their way to the bar.

One of them peered at the identification tags worn by all athletes and saw she was Australian and, therefore, shared a common language.

"What do you do?" the New Zealand Press Association reporter inquired.

"I'm in the rowing eight."

Uncomfortable pause.

"Yes, that f***ing eight," she said.

FOR AUSTRALIANS, it was the story of the Athens Games. Forget Thorpedo versus Phelps or any of the 49 medals accrued in a variety of sports.

The 'Lay Down Sally' fiasco created waves that still ripple through Australian rowing, too, especially of late when the central character in the drama, Sally Robbins, attempted a last-ditch qualification for the Beijing Olympics.

Don't Rock the Boat, a fascinating new insight into the shattering events pre- and post-race by ABC reporter Peter Wilkins has revealed the depths of despair experienced by those closely involved.

Perhaps no event since the Underarm Incident had cut deeper into the psyche of Australians and their attitude to sport than what happened in the final of women's eight on the purpose-built Schinias course in the Marathon Valley.

With just a few hundred metres between themselves and an outside chance of an Olympic medal, Sally Robbins, in the six seat, simply stopped rowing.

"It's a deep wound that hasn't been salved," Wilkins writes in his prologue.

More so, it was the events before and after the race that created so much mistrust and animosity.

Robbins' meltdown was just the catalyst.

On a wider scale, it made the seemingly indomitable nation pause for thought, made them take a step back and see how they viewed their sport and sportspeople and, in some cases, made them question what it meant to be Australian.

"IF IT takes seven of us to get the boat across the line, we'll do it," stroke Kyeema Doyle was heard saying to boat captain Julia Wilson before they left the shed for the last time on the day of the final, unaware of how prophetic those words would be. The night before, two seat Jodi Winter had a vision of her beating Robbins around the head with a baseball bat.