CAE (Advanced Exam) Listening Test 5

Part 3
15 D 16 A 17 B 18 C 19 B 20 C

For questions 15–20, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which fits best according to what you hear.
In the exam, you have 70 seconds to look at Part 3.

Interviewer: My guests today are Greg Marton and Lina Derridge, both long-distance racing
cyclists, who have also taken part in other quite different sports. Greg, let’s start
with you. You were raised in Newfoundland, Canada, where most kids start off
playing ice hockey, don’t they?
Greg: That’s right. My dad was a big ice hockey fan, so I think I’d learned how to skate
before I could walk. Up until senior high school, hockey’s the sport and then there’s
a choice to make, whether you're good enough to go to the Juniors or not. Maybe if
I'd had a stronger training discipline I would’ve made it. It wasn’t my dad’s fault, but
I think you've got to have really solid parental support; where you’re forced to
practise because, when you're sixteen, you don't have the willpower you have at
thirty. I’ve no regrets, but I look back and think: ‘Why wasn't I training? I just played
games!’ But that’s how it was!
Interviewer: So you moved over to rowing?
Greg: I remember, as a teenager, the economy being really bad in my home area, and I
thought to myself: ‘Either I get a degree or get myself a sporting career. Otherwise,
I’ll never get out of here!’ So I took a two-pronged approach. After ice hockey, I ran
cross-country with moderate success, and guys I met there put me onto rowing.
And I was pretty good at it because I was a little more heavily built than people
coming from a running background – in ice hockey we did a lot of weight training –
and I just took to rowing and said: ‘OK, National Team here we come!’ So, while I
was doing my degree in electrical engineering, I just kept rowing and, in the end,
both of them got me out of there.
Interviewer: And Lina, you’ve also done competitive rowing. How did your competitive rowing
career develop?
Lina: It was kind of weird. Rowing's such a team sport that you really need to go to things
called training camps. But I was working full-time at a computer company, so I
couldn’t often make them. I had to train myself, which was fair enough, and I don’t
think it was that which held me back. But, when it came to the trials for the national
team, if it was a four-woman boat, I had to come in the top four in the trials to get in
the team. If I was fifth I would be the cut-line, right? And I regularly got fifth when
they were making a four, or third when they were making a double. It was just bad
luck really; so near and yet so far. Then one year, when I actually made it into the
team, we didn’t actually qualify for the World Championships. That was kind of
tough.
Interviewer: Is that why you decided to move to California?
Lina: Well, although it coincided with my realising I’d gone as far as I could go in rowing,
it wasn’t the reason for the move. I’m not a quitter, but I needed a new outlet, something else to direct my energies into. For me, sport rather than work had
always provided that, but I was quite happy working in computers. Then my
manager and a couple of other workers left and went to California. They were
already keen cyclists, by the way. I was in two minds whether to join them, and after
about six months of arm-twisting, decided to make the leap. It was a combination of
factors that made me go, but it was a good move. From there, getting into the
cycling just kind of happened. It hadn’t been part of the plan.
Interviewer: And do they have much in common, rowing and cycling?
Greg: Well, rowing’s a tough sport, which helps me. And a couple of other team-mates
who’ve switched over from rowing agree. A lot of the newbies in the sport, who
don’t have my rowing background, lack the willingness to put up with what I call the
‘full-on suffer.’ Like, say it’s on a ten-minute climb, the damage doesn't happen
immediately, it comes at the eight-minute point.
Lina: As a cyclist, you need to commit at some point in a race, you need to throw yourself
out into the wind and just go for it – no matter how much it hurts. You don’t get that
so much in rowing; you’re thinking much more as a team.
Interviewer: And are their parallels in the training too?
Greg: Yeah, I actually supplement my cycling training with a little rowing. I fell in love with
the sport originally, not really from a competition point of view, just from the feeling
of it. I think cycling’s one of these sports where it's just so focussed on a certain
group of muscles that, if that’s all you do, it's only a matter of time before you're
going to have problems. What’s more, as a cyclist, you develop very little upperbody
muscle, so you don’t have a lot of protection if you come off and hit the
ground. So I run and row as cross-training as much as I can, and I’d advise other
cyclists to do the same.
Lina: I’d go along with that. But another thing ...