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After Retirement, U.S. Picks Up Burden

By John Mullen
Special to The Washington Post
July 5, 1996

By any measure, Doug Burden's rowing career has been illustrious. A pair of Olympic medals and a seven-year run as a member of the U.S. national team have earned him a legendary reputation in his sport.

Yet Burden's legacy does not include the talisman that galvanized him for the better part of a decade: a gold medal. Last fall, after three years of retirement, Burden's lack of athletic closure drove him from his Dupont Circle apartment to an Olympic training center in a suburb outside San Diego. Remarkably, just six months after undergoing surgery for a herniated disk, Burden won a seat on the the men's eight in March. The U.S. eight is a premier boat expected to contend for the gold at the Atlanta Games.

"Winning the gold medal is something I thought about every day for . . . years," Burden said recently in a telephone interview. "I was going out of my mind. I was dreaming about it every other night. I knew I had some unfinished business."

Burden, 30, won a bronze medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics as a member of the men's eight and earned a silver medal four years later in Barcelona in the men's four without coxswain. He is one of a handful of U.S. rowers to win medals twice in Olympic rowing, which began competition in 1900. But by the end of the 1992 Olympics, he'd had enough. Or so he thought.

Instead of spending the intervening years training with other national team rowers for the then-distant 1996 Olympics, Burden, who has lived intermittently in the Washington area for a decade, returned to Barcelona to attend graduate school, coached at Georgetown and worked in Arlington. At one point, he went nearly a year without rowing. When he did, it was mostly as a member of the Potomac Boat Club. But as the Atlanta Olympics neared, the gold-medal goal set long ago inexorably resurfaced.

"I knew I wanted to give it another shot," Burden said. "While I still had it, I did not want to let it go."

When Burden resumed training, he had to face a serious obstacle in his quest to compete. He was operated on Sept. 11 in Washington; fragments of material were removed from a herniated disk. No one knew, including Burden, how he would hold up during the grueling boat-selection process against a new generation of highly skilled rowers. He was a recognizable name, hindered by questionable health.

"He was sort of legendary," said 24-year-old Ted Murphy, who is in his first year with the team. "He had more or less been absent from rowing ever since Barcelona. . . . It is a new world out here."

Burden's status in the rowing community did not lessen the tension he felt when he arrived in California in November. Despite his accomplishments, his absence from the U.S. national team—he was a member from 1986 to 1992—placed him in the social and athletic fringe.

"The core of the group has been together for four years now. I'm a little bit of an outsider—or was," said Burden. "It is generally not viewed with high regard to come in during an Olympic year and make the team. It can be seen as arrogant and presumptive."

However, the unexpected chance to row with Burden soon turned into an invigorating experience for many of the younger rowers. Murphy, who like Burden lives at the ARCO Training Center near the Otay Reservoir in Chula Vista, Calif., quickly realized that Burden had not traveled west for sentimental reasons. "He was coming off back surgery. [But] he got fitter and fitter and stronger and stronger as the year went on."

So far, an intensive stretching routine has kept Burden from reinjuring his back. And Burden's cerebral method has complemented the boat's aggressive style.

"He has performed better than was expected," said U.S. men's sweep coach Michael Spracklen. "He is strong. He is tough. I would not call him a sheer power [rower]. He is not a big muscle man."

Burden and Murphy joined Porter Collins, Jon Brown, Fred Honebein, Bob Kaehler, Jamie Koven, Don Smith and coxswain Steven Segaloff after final seat selections in March. With relatively little time spent rowing as a unit, the men's eight is still developing synchronicity. The United States finished third behind the Netherlands and Romania in a regatta in Germany in May.

One of the biggest challenges Burden and rest of the crew will face in the Olympics is the mounting pressure of expectation. The U.S. men's eight has not won the gold medal since 1964, and though they are not seen as the top boat, they should be in the running with the Netherlands and Romania, among others, for the gold when competition begins late this month at Lake Lanier in Gainesville, Ga.

Burden has become used to high expectations. To him, the dream of a winning a gold medal has become palpable. Anything less than first place will be a disappointment.

"Everybody out here thinks about winning a gold medal every day," Burden said. "There was the element of one last step, one missing component of my career. . . . It was bronze in '88 and silver in '92. Maybe the next step is the gold."