Strokes of genius

Here comes Greg, Steve Tucker says. Gotta help him pull the boat out of the water. Wouldn't want to tip it. Lord, no. Tucker spent 200 hours in his kitchen concocting that jumble of wires on the back of the boat, the one that would make MacGyver scratch his head and walk away. If it gets wet, the thing would be totally useless, and Tucker can't have that.

He needs to analyze his rowing stroke, because, for all his strengths as an Olympic rower, he's still as subjective as the next human being. He can only feel, and feel isn't good enough for an MIT physicist. That jumble of wires -- it doesn't feel. It spits out the information Tucker needs -- cold, hard, objective feedback.

It's not the only device Tucker invented to help his rowing, just the most advanced. Ranging from practical to way-over-your-head, Tucker has been coming up with ways to improve his rowing since a party at his fraternity introduced him to the sport 14 years ago.

Coupling science with a compulsive work ethic, Tucker, along with partner Greg Ruckman, qualified for Athens by winning the lightweight doubles trial at Lake Mercer in West Windsor, N.J., May 22. It will be his second Olympics after finishing 11th in Sydney in 2000 with Conal Groom.

"Going to your second Olympics, a more significant part of the experience is doing well," Tucker said. "The first time, you were so excited just to go. The second time around, you know it's a lot of work to prepare to go. I think we should have a good chance of medaling."

If they do, they can thank, at least partly, that jumble of wires on the back of the boat. It's called an accelerometer, and it's attached to four transducers, one each to measure instantaneous speed, oar lock angle, seat position, and GPS. That information flows into Tucker's Palm Pilot or laptop, which computes the data and comes up with power curves for his acceleration. All of this helps "optimize biochemistry," said Brad Layton, his Delta Upsilon frat brother who got him into rowing.

To the layperson, "It just kind of gives us some idea of what we're doing," Tucker said.

"Stuff most people find incomprehensible," said Charley Butt, Tucker's coach. "He's out there doing it with no worry about him."

The brilliance of the gadget, though, lies in its simplicity. With nightmarish conditions expected for races in Athens, Tucker tried to come up with a way to prepare. To avoid bogging down in choppy waters, a rower needs to lift his oar clean and high above the water.

Tucker invented a training device that's as effective as it is simple. He attached bent rectangles of aluminum to the end of blades that, when the blade isn't brought out of the water enough, make it nearly impossible to row. Tucker's and Ruckman's training partners use the device now, too.

A cool demeanor
Tucker's intelligence makes him ideal to row behind Ruckman. While most opponents have a tendency to storm out of the gate, Tucker is content to play the part of the tortoise, something most rowers can't psychologically handle, since they face backward. Not knowing their pace -- something Tucker studies religiously -- makes many rowers panic, leaving them too exhausted to finish strongly.

Tucker competes with the cool demeanor of an airplane pilot, racing in a come-from-behind manner that surprises stronger opponents.

"He keeps the process rational," Butt said.

Tucker has the physiology to match his mentality. The morning after his first strokes on a rowing machine at a frat party, he joined the team at MIT. A swimmer in high school and at MIT, Tucker already had the cardiovascular endurance needed for rowing.

Unlike most sports, rowing requires little creativity. It's one stroke repeated thousands of times. After learning that, it comes down to who's willing to punish their bodies most to become as efficient as possible, to concentrate on finding a perfect stroke.

"I think I do have a tendency, whatever I'm doing, to try and do it pretty well," Tucker said. "It's kind of a compulsion."

Tucker started renovating a house in Boston in 1993. Eleven years later, it still isn't done, mostly because he replaced the entire foundation to allow underground parking and reproduced Victorian details on the outside of the house.

At MIT, he completed his undergraduate course work in three years. Senior year, Tucker took graduate biology courses just for kicks.

When Tucker, living in his native Indiana at the time, received an invitation to Layton's Minnesota wedding, he mailed his tuxedo there. Carrying a credit card, ATM card, and spare tire, he rode his bike 125 miles a day for four days to the wedding. Why not? He felt like making a long bike ride.

"I can't help myself," Tucker said. "Some of that is the same in rowing. You have to push yourself more than you want to. You work hard to do well, and then you realize you have to work harder than you really want to accomplish what you want."

So that explains how a 5-foot-8-inch, bespectacled physicist who didn't row his first stroke until age 21 could make the Olympics. He trains six days a week, twice a day during the week, once on Saturday, with Sunday off. The typical day is a pair of 12-mile, 2-hour sessions followed by watching video, sometimes in slow motion, to pick up the slightest blemish in his stroke, making his usual total six hours a day.

"He is a maniacal trainer," Butt said. "Out at a training event in San Diego, amongst his peers people were impressed, people used to training 20-30 hours a week themselves."

Prank check
Not everyone understands Tucker's methods. Before a trial race last year, Ruckman tucked a cellphone in a small pouch so a team that had raced could call from the finish line and inform the tandem of any headwind or tailwind, so they could adjust their pacing.

Two minutes before the start, the phone rang. On a lake with no surrounding traffic, the ring reverberated for hundreds of meters. As Ruckman whispered into the cellphone, US rower John Cashman looked over and asked, "Who the hell brings a phone to the start of a race?"

"Oh, the markets have just opened in Shanghai," came Tucker's deadpan response. "Markets open in Asia for Monday morning. Our broker is calling us."

As intense as Tucker can be when he confronts an objective, he has a light air about him, "a Midwestern politeness," as Butt puts it.

He's a heck of a prankster, too. One night in college, Tucker and Layton sneaked to the then-under-construction Harvard bridge, where workers had left out tanks of liquid oxygen. Tucker and Layton -- putting their physics training to good use -- reasoned that if they could find a material with high surface area and moderate combustibility, they could satisfy their inner physicist and blow something up.

They settled on steel wool wrapped in toilet paper. When they ignited it, Tucker didn't look away in time, and he still carries the scar, barely visible now under his eye, to prove it. The accident didn't stop Tucker and Layton from inventing sports such as couch-surfing later at MIT. (As one might assume, details of some those events are better left at MIT circa 1990.)

Today, instead of exploding things, Tucker uses his degree to move petunias and ask Home Depot customers, "How may I help you?"

Along with a quarter of the US Rowing team, Tucker participates in Home Depot's job opportunity program, which was set up to allow Olympians flexible employment when they train. So when Tucker needs three weeks off for a training trip to San Diego, he can get it.

It's been worth it. Despite a fourth-place finish at the World Cup, Butt and Tucker believe their boat was as fast, if not faster, than any at the competition in Lucerne, Switzerland. The pressure of qualifying only five days earlier -- Tucker, who usually can sleep easy, slept just five hours a night that week --made it impossible for the Americans to show their best hand. Even their No. 1 weapon, pacing, was off, as they started too slow, falling behind a staggering nine seconds before launching a comeback.

No matter. To panic now wouldn't be rational, wouldn't be objective. Heck, it wouldn't be Steve Tucker, the MIT graduate, home-remodeler, and inventor who wants to add Olympic medalist to those titles.

"There aren't many Olympic-class MIT physicists who can do all of that," Butt said. "That's what makes him unique. He just goes."