2
BEIJING — Yesterday, all of 36 hours after he got his 10th dose of his second round of chemotherapy in his hotel room, Bent Jensen was down at the boathouse at the Shunyi rowing basin, watching Olympic highlights with the Canadian staff as they waited for the lightning and thunder to clear.
The storm loitered, the weather forced a postponement of the racing, buying the formidable Jensen another day to recover his strength, not that anyone should presume he needed it.
After all, just two days earlier, he rode his bike along the two-kilometre course, with the other coaches, watching the lightweight men's four work out.
As Mike Wilkinson, the Canadian rowing team doctor who first urged Jensen to see his own physician two years ago, told The Globe and Mail this week with the sort of considered understatement Jensen likely would approve, "He is a very tough man."
Widely recognized as the best lightweight rowing coach in the world, the 60-year-old was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer after the 2006 world championships in Eton, England.
It was only six months after Rowing Canada had lured him from his native Denmark, where he had coached the Danish lightweight four (in the lightweight category, introduced as an Olympic sport only in 1996, limits are placed on how much competitors can weigh) to two Olympic gold medals and a bronze and an astonishing three-year-long unbeaten streak during which the Danes never lost a heat, let alone a final.
What followed was a five-to-six month hospital stay in Denmark and an exhaustive series of treatments that would have felled a normal man — the cancer-fighting triple of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
But Jensen isn't ordinary. He regaled callers and visitors with the story of how he'd told a well-meaning physiotherapist that he'd come out of the OR with a limp (in truth, the limp is from childhood polio).
The physiotherapist cheerfully announced, as such folks are wont to do, that she'd soon have him up and walking right.
As Iain Brambell, the 34-year-old veteran who came out of retirement in part to have the chance to be coached by Jensen, said recently, "All the way, he kept his sense of humour."
Almost immediately after he finished treatment in Denmark early last year, Jensen and his wife Ulla returned to Victoria, where Canadian rowers are based and where Ulla says people have been terribly welcoming and "so sweet."
The athletes and their Danish coach had 15 good months together before the cancer came back last May. It was long enough to get the measure of one another, and to become awfully close in the quiet way of rowers (Jensen was one himself in his youth, though he didn't "get that high up," making it only to the national level), who tend to be among the most cerebral of athletes.
Once this summer, the team went to Europe ahead of Jensen, who was due for his weekly treatment; a few days later, he got on a plane one morning and was with them in the boathouse the next afternoon. The lengths that Jensen would go to be with them now plain, the rowers promptly rearranged the rest of their training schedule and even had their camp in Duncan, on Vancouver Island, so Jensen could more easily return to Victoria for his chemo.
"We chose to stay in Canada because it was a better place to be for Bent and easier to do our training with him," Brambell said. "It was better for us, too."
Just before the team left for China, the cumulative toll of the 12-week course of chemo rendering Jensen thin and a little frail, he began sometimes using ski-pole-like sticks to help him walk. Occasionally, since arriving in Beijing, the rowers have caught glimpses of him in the hotel in a wheelchair.
But as Brambell said, "Bent doesn't show a lot of weakness," so neither do they.
Since the news of Jensen's illness emerged in a public way this week — Ulla said he likes the distraction provided by the telephone interviews he does in the evenings when he's not too tired, so it's not always "cancer-cancer-cancer, chemo-chemo-chemo" playing in his head — the team has been open to discussing the situation, but only in the most careful, respectful terms.
"When we talk about it [the cancer]," Brambell said, "we talk about treatment, this is what he has to get done and we plan around it. We want to do whatever's best for him. Bent's perspective is that it keeps his mind doing something else."
The weekly treatment consists of an intravenous drip that takes about a half hour to administer; Wilkinson, who is in charge of Jensen's care here, does a blood test the day before to make sure he's up to it.
"Usually, for a day or two after, he's fatigued," Wilkinson said. "It depends on the cycle; he can be quite nauseous. He also gets symptomatic treatment, and we try to conserve his strength."
Because of the race schedule, Jensen gets the chemo on Tuesday nights, giving him as much time as possible to recover between races.
The athletes, Brambell said, draw inspiration from their coach, as he draws strength from them. The rowers don't feel a particular pressure to win a medal for him — "That pressure has always been there," Bramwell said — but rather to follow his workouts to the letter, to soak up his instructions.
"Bent is a great internal motivator for us to do things better," Bramwell said. And not just technical things, but bigger lessons. "Bent's philosophy is based around giving 100 per cent of your focus to rowing, but that sometimes you take your head away from it and focus on other things too," such as the "valuable relationships around you," in Brambell's case, his wife and baby daughter, and the second child due in December.
"Sport is sport," Brambell said, "and it's wonderful, but …"
Only once did Brambell drop his guard a little, this when he was talking about the importance of listening to Jensen, of learning all they can. "Next row," he said, "we may not have him standing there. So we want to get it right."
Get it right, commit to memory the sight of the Dane they love, moving like the wind on his bicycle beside them, along the race course.
