If Paul Enquist had been a boxer, a swimmer, a gymnast or an athlete in some other potentially lucrative sport, his gold medal at the 1984 Olympic Games could have been a pathway to fame and prosperity. Decades later, he might yet be living off the profits of victory.
Instead, he was a rower. An exceptional rower, for sure, but still someone who chose, in his words, “an obscure, out-of-the-spotlight sport” that is equal parts hard work and poverty.
Enquist eventually had one chance to cash in on his success. A year after he and teammate Brad Lewis won the 2,000-meter double sculls competition at the Los Angeles Games, a Texas bank hired Enquist for a television commercial.
“It was about a week,” said the 52-year-old Enquist, who lives in Edmonds, “and I got paid a few thousand dollars, which was really big money for me. And that was it. Financially, that was all it was worth.”
Evidently, not all gold medals are created equal, at least in the eyes of Madison Avenue folks. But for the rest of us, what Enquist and Lewis accomplished at Lake Casitas outside Santa Barbara, Calif., in the summer of ‘84 remains remarkable and even historic. It was the first and only Olympic gold medal by any American individual or team in sculling – boats where rowers use two oars, not one – since 1932, and the last medal of any kind for the U.S. men in double sculls.
Also, it was the last Olympic gold medal for American men in rowing until the U.S. eights with coxswain – a sweeping event, or single oars – placed first at Athens four years ago.
“It seems strange to me that (a U.S. crew winning) hasn’t happened more often, because I didn’t think we did anything all that special,” Enquist said. “But obviously that’s been proven otherwise as time’s gone on.”
Enquist, who graduated from Seattle’s Ballard High School in 1973, started rowing as a freshman at Washington State University. After college he returned to Seattle and continued training while working part-time jobs. His goal was to make a U.S. national team, which he finally did in 1983, rowing with Lewis in double sculls at the world championships, where they placed sixth.
In the months before the Olympics, Enquist and Lewis considered splitting their tandem, in part because Lewis wanted to row the single scull in the Olympics. But they ended up back together, and there was some hope for a medal as they headed to Los Angeles with their U.S. teammates.
In the early moments of the six-nation final – Belgium, Canada, Italy, West Germany and Yugoslavia were the others – Enquist and Lewis promptly dropped to last place. They fell so far behind, in fact, they were out of the ABC-TV picture as taken by the camera truck driving parallel to the race course.
“We were doing exactly what we’d planned on doing, but we were in last place by quite a bit,” Enquist said. “I was setting the cadence and steering the boat, and a quarter of the way into the race I’m kind of wondering, ‘What’s going on?’ But it’s a 6½-minute race, so you have to row with some sense of pace. We weren’t blasting away because we knew we’d tie up in knots if we went out too hard.”
At 1,000 meters Enquist and Lewis had moved from sixth to fifth. At 1,500 meters they were in second, trailing only the Belgians.
The Americans drew even with about 200 meters to go. They stayed roughly abreast of the Belgians for another 100 meters, and then pulled away with their final few strokes for a half-boat-length victory.
Enquist remembers the next few moments vividly. After years of being on mediocre rowing teams at WSU, and then struggling to rise in the ranks of the U.S. national program, “my first thought was, ‘Damn, we finally won a race.’ I didn’t have a lot of wins in my career, and it just didn’t sink in right away that we’d won THE race.”
Later on the podium, he was neither overly jubilant while receiving his gold medal, nor particularly emotional during the “Star Spangled Banner.”
As the anthem played, he said, “I was thinking I’d better just stand there at attention and not look like a fool because there were probably about 12,000 to 15,000 people in the stands watching.” Still, he recalls the entire race-to-podium experience being “very neat and really satisfying.”
Longtime University of Washington crew coach Bob Ernst, who’d worked with Enquist and Lewis before the Olympics, says their triumph could be compared to the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s surprising gold medal.
What Enquist and Lewis did “wasn’t live on national TV” like the hockey team, Ernst said. “But it was certainly of that magnitude in terms of two virtual unknowns coming along and making it happen” at the Olympics.
“Those two rowed the race of their lives that day,” he added. “And it was magic, just magic, the way they clicked together.”
Almost certainly, Enquist and Lewis benefited from a Soviet Union-led boycott of the LA Games that included most of the communist-bloc countries. It was a retaliation for the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.
“In our doubles event,” Enquist said, “the boycott definitely had an effect. The Russians were not very strong that year and neither were any of the other communist-bloc countries. But the East Germans, year in and year out, were always one of the best.
“We’d lost to them twice, but we felt we were faster than they were and we were actually looking forward to rowing against them,” he said. “But it didn’t happen.”
Enquist’s gold medal race was the last of his rowing career. Even before the Olympics, he’d made the decision to retire.
“I was tired of working out twice a day, seven days a week,” he said. “Of not holding a real job. And of being broke all the time. It was time to move on with life. (Winning a gold medal) was a nice way to go out. But win, lose or whatever, I knew it was time to move on.”
He became a full-time commercial fisherman and later a longshoreman, and today is a longshore foreman in Seattle. He got married and raised a family, including a son Charlie who is a member of the WSU basketball team and another son Oliver who expects to join the University of Washington rowing team in the fall.
Enquist also has showed up in two books about rowing. One is “The Amateurs,” written by the late David Halberstam, which is a wonderful chronicle of the culture around the U.S. national rowing program in the early 1980s. The other is a book by Lewis titled “Assault on Lake Casitas,” about his life in rowing, culminating with the Olympic triumph.
For Enquist, that same victory continues to represent “a goal reached and the personal satisfaction that comes from achieving it. Because if I had a silver medal, I’d forever be going back and thinking, ‘Gee, if I’d just done this, maybe I’d have won.’
“But I don’t ever have to think about that,” he said, “which is really good.”
Rich Myhre writes for The Herald in Everett.
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