Larry Hough and
Tony Johnson
Rowing
Hough was an Olympian in 1968 and 1972, Johnson in 1964 and 1968.
Silver medal, men’s pairs, 1968
Larry Hough is a gregarious, chatty venture capitalist
originally from Wisconsin. Tony Johnson—the pensive, almost shy coach of
the Georgetown University crew team—grew up in Arlington.
The two men seem very different until you get them talking
about their 1968 Olympic silver medals or their years of training
together. They finish each other’s stories—of daily walks through a cow
pasture in Colorado to get from their house to their training site, of an
impromptu soccer match at the Pan Am Games in 1967 that left Tony with a
broken nose.
The story neither of them likes to finish concerns the ’68
Olympics. They had trained at a high altitude for months in preparation
for Mexico City, where they would race at nearly 7,500 feet. They had
devised a plan, says Hough, “to row as hard as we could for as long as we
could and hope that was enough.”
They had reason to believe it would be: In the two previous
seasons, they’d lost only once.
They purposely hadn’t taught themselves to set a comfortable
pace—they didn’t want to be comfortable. But as the two men approached the
finish line, they needed a burst of speed—and had nothing left. An East
German team that hadn’t even seemed in contention beat them by two
feet.
The men have gone on to successful careers in coaching and
finance, but Hough says of the loss, “I count that on a very short list of
huge disappointments in life.”
