KEY POINTS:
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.
Coach Harald Jahrling, a product of the East German system, took Robbins away from the rest of the crew before they got in the boat and did not return for several minutes. It was viewed as unusual. But Australia's great start, something they had struggled with through the regatta, soon had their minds on other things.
At the halfway mark they were a canvas behind the Romanians in second, with the US and Netherlands close behind.
Doyle recalled when it all started to go pear-shaped. "I know the exact call [from the coxswain] that flicked Sally's head. I know the exact call, the exact moment, the exact stroke," she details in the book. "Katie [Foulkes] said, 'no one knows you're here. You're in second. Are you going to let those [Romanians] beat you?' They were there, just there. And I came forward and put my blade in and that was it. It was heavy. I looked in Katie's eyes, and she just sort of went white."
As it turned out, Foulkes was so afraid Robbins would melt she had rehearsed calls for that scenario and she had to put it calmly into practice, saying: "We're down to seven."
Possibly even more galling, Wilkins reports that some of the men's team, and some of the rowing fraternity in the stands were effectively playing a game where they tried to predict when Robbins would stop rowing.
Winter recalled: "Then a blade came out of sync. And then, it started getting worse... Then it was gone, she's having a little snooze. 'Lay Down Sally', I thought'."
CLEARLY, ROBBINS' problems in finishing races were no secret to the team or to those associated with rowing in Australia.
In 2001, in the quad, Robbins had nearly collapsed a minute out from the finish line. Other crew had complained of effectively having to carry Robbins across the line during races.
In the immediate aftermath of the Olympic final, the abuse in the boat was vicious and sustained.
Catriona Oliver was urging Julia Wilson to punch Robbins because "I can't reach her". Doyle was screaming at Robbins to get out of the boat, to hand her accreditation in and get the hell out of there. Julia Wilson was telling her she disgusted her.
It was raw, unadulterated hatred, and understandable in the heat of the moment.
But that was just the start.
ROWING AUSTRALIA'S worst-kept secret was about to be exposed. It soon emerged the events were entirely predictable.
Robbins had stopped rowing in a world championship quad final two years earlier and members of that team had apparently refused ever to row with her again. There were several other cited incidents where she had failed to row out the race properly.
Parents, like Rob Oliver, blamed Rowing Australia whom they felt should have called curtains on Robbins' career much earlier. "But nobody from Rowing Australia did that, and they bloody well should have."
Back on the pontoon at Schinias recriminations began in earnest and both management and the media liaison contingent failed dismally to contain it.
"I just want to stress it was not a technical problem out there... There were nine in the boat. There were eight operating," said Wilson, lighting a flame that still has not been properly doused.
Seeing that Robbins was conducting her own post-race interview, she called out "Don't lie, Sally, don't lie."
The media knew then this was no heart-breaking gear-failure story. It was a full-blown news story of the type nobody was prepared for.
That evening, back at the media centre in Athens, Australian journalists returning from the race looked stunned. Half an hour after the race, in the full glare of anybody in the vicinity, Robbins was circled by the rest of the crew and they let rip. Jarhling stood just 10 metres away and has been heavily criticised for not intervening.
"It shouldn't have got to that. They should have had their catharsis in a room upstairs," said rowing administrator John Boultbee, who stumbled across the scene. "Not that it would have solved the problem forever but it would have helped them deal with it."
The headlines began rolling out in Australia - "Lay Down Sally"; "Just Oarful"; "It's Eight, Mate, Pull Your Weight" - and Robbins was painted as both villain and victim.
Soon though, the feeling was that her team-mates had been unnecessarily cruel and public sentiment switched to Robbins. Her team-mates were even labelled "un-Australian".
Wilson, the most vociferous in her public condemnation of Robbins was so distraught by the changing tide she refused to leave her room and has only rarely visited her home country.
ACCORDING TO the women Wilkins interviewed for the book, such as Doyle, the rowers felt abandoned and in some cases betrayed.
There is no doubt, however, that Robbins was treated with a contempt bordering on the unreasonable. At a welcome home party for Olympians, Oliver slapped Robbins in full view of onlookers, including sponsors.
A former team-mate of Robbins, Rachel Taylor, wrote a withering open letter to the media. "Sunday was a repeat display of complete mental weakness, not 'physical exhaustion' as the media is reporting... The question of why Sally Robbins was selected on to the Australian team after her display in 2002 needs to be raised with the decision makers of Rowing Australia."
Team manager Wayne Diplock believed the whispering campaign was being written retrospectively and there had been no great hue and cry after previous events. He told Wilkins Robbins had been unfairly castigated.
Selector David Yates knew Robbins had a tendency to "fly and die" but never felt it warranted dropping the supreme athlete who invariably finished in the top three in both on-and-off the water testing.
A report commissioned by the AOC put her team-mates in an unfavourable light with the author, Michael Tancred, saying Doyle acted like a "princess".
Wilkins, however, paints them in far more sympathetic shades, detailing the enormous personal sacrifices each made to get to the Olympics, and their difficulties since. These are not nasty women, just athletes unnecessarily placed in a position where they did not have the skills or, more crucially, the support to cope with it.
Still, the incident reverberates.
Rowing Australia president Pat McNamara said the treatment Sally Robbins got was like that afforded to Lindy Chamberlain.
The mother of Azaria, who went missing at Uluru all those years ago, found redemption eventually. Robbins won't get that opportunity in Beijing after missing selection. Maybe she'll never really get it at all.
The same might be said of her team-mates, most of whom no longer row for Australia either.
