Short transcript excerpt from a YouTube interview with New Zealand rower Finn Butcher about his Paris Olympics gold medal. The exchange includes casual banter about the medal (noting it weighs 400 grams), discussion of his mindset of enjoying the Games, descriptions of hard training and solo sessions, and a prompt asking about his mentor "Sarge."
This thing's a bad boy. It's heavy.
Yeah, it's 400 grams.
We've got the Olympic gold medal sitting between us.
I wanted to approach the whole Games, like, with the mindset that I wanted to enjoy it.
Going into Paris, did you think that you could come home with that running out?
Yeah, I did. I was throwing my body forward as hard as I can, getting back, landing well, and then just sending it with the strokes.
Obviously you had some skill and talent, but did you have to work hard?
It was a lot of hard work, a lot of thinking, a lot of sessions by myself.
Sarge, I've heard you talk about him a lot in the past when I listen to different interviews. So who was Sarge?
Got diagnosed with terminal cancer in around 2015, I think it was, and was kind of given six to nine months. So that was a big shock for the whole community. Just wanted to see people enjoy the sport of kayaking and get as many people into it as possible. And he basically was just an Atlas pigeon. I'd been in a good place, but it was kind of a crazy, crazy time.
