Racked with pain, an Olympian retires
Rower McBean tearfully pulls out of Games

PATRICIA YOUNG
The Globe and Mail

Nothing hurts as much as quitting. Marnie McBean has 12 Olympic and world championship medals, but yesterday the tearful rower said she was leaving the sport she loved for the future she craves.

Since she was a teenager, Ms. McBean has defined herself through rowing. It was her life. But two ruptured discs have changed the way she sees life. With pain has come clarity. She told The Globe and Mail from her dimly lit room at the Canadian team's Australian training centre that she wants a future, not just a string of tarnished medals and memories.

As she spoke, her passion became stronger and the words tumbled. "It's not just rowing. I want to be able to play golf, to have a family . . . to play with my family. All that makes the decision real easy."

And staring at an X-ray of your back that shows two bubbling discs tends to clear your mind quickly. It was this that allowed the 32-year- old rower to say, "It's time."

"The MRI was what saved me mentally," she said. "I could look at it and go 'wow.' "
"I could see where the disc was hitting the spinal column," Ms. McBean said. "I knew this was not something I could race through; not something I could rest for a few days and then train."

With just 17 days until the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Ms. McBean knew she was finished. She and her coach, Al Morrow, tried to hide the injury from the team when it happened two weeks ago. But the whispers had begun. Her physiotherapist and doctor both told her it was time to hang up her oars. "But I didn't believe them," she said, even though she had been so paralyzed with pain that she had to be carried into a coach boat halfway though a training row.

When she was a 17-year-old Toronto high-school student, she appeared on the dock of the Argonaut Rowing Club. Even at that age, the mark of a champion was apparent to anyone who cared to notice the drive and fire masked by her class-clown antics and trademark rippling laugh.

She went on to become Canada's gutsiest and most successful rower. While Silken Laumann made the headlines at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona with her Cinderella comeback after a leg injury, Ms. McBean led the women's team to two gold medals. Heading into these Games, the sculler had won Olympic and world- championship gold in every crew-boat class, something no other female rower has done.

To win you have to be self-centred. Without that steely core, you can compete but you will never triumph. No one triumphs more than Ms. McBean, and no one has more fun doing it. Instead of talking about herself yesterday, she turned the conversation to her former teammates.

Laughing at the memories, she said it was the women in her boat at Barcelona that made that win so tasty. Not the gold -- the people. And when the crew found out Ms. McBean was poised to quit, they rallied to her side.

Amid laughs that turned to sobs, Ms. McBean said she was flooded by e-mails from the crew of 1992. "Every morning there were e-mails and every morning there were tears."

But what startled her even more was the outpouring of emotion from her current teammates. Instead of the daily crew camaraderie, Ms. McBean had left the cocoon of crew boats and was rowing the single sculls at Sydney. Long-distance runners can train side by side, but scullers are truly alone.

So when Ms. McBean bolted from the Rockhampton dining room after telling her team she was finished -- "I couldn't lie to them any more" -- she was shocked to see "a receiving line of hugs waiting for me as I tried to get to my room.

"I told them then because I wanted to make sure they were not the last to know."

The plan had been to make a news announcement in Sydney during the Games so that she and the team could be shielded from the press in the Olympic village. But Ms. McBean's strength as a competitor has been to know when to improvise.

This has landed her in trouble in the past. She was outspoken about her belief that sprinter Donovan Bailey should give back his $200,000 spokesman fee to the 1999 Pan Am Games organizers in Winnipeg when he failed to run the 100 metres.

She also created a funding program for struggling athletes when sports bodies were too slow to cough up money, and she has given money to support female sports initiatives when no one else would.

Her frank views may not have endeared her to Canadian officials, but there is no more popular rower internationally. "She is Canadian rowing. She is Canada's ambassador and she is great," said Australia coach Uwe Bender.

Olympic gold-medal swimmer Mark Tewksbury said Ms. McBean's new challenge will be handling life beyond the rowing course and channelling her drive.

"That is the spirit of Marnie. This will be a new challenge, but she has been up against challenges every day," he said. "Marnie will be fine."

reprinted with permission

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