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OXFORD POWERS To VICTORY IN THE FIRST UNIVERSITY BOAT RACE, 1829

the great chronicler of Georgian sport, could report in 1801, that, ‘when a rowing match takes place near London, if the weather be fine, it is astonishing to see what crowds of people assemble themselves on the banks of the Thames as spectators, and the river itself is nearly covered with wherries, pleasure boats and barges, decorated with flags and streamers and sometimes accompanied by bands of music..’

Through the nineteenth century the British public’s appetite for rowing races grew, but in two almost entirely separate social spheres. . On the one hand was professional racing, which flourished in London and on theTyne.. On the other was a world of elite amateur rowing clubs such as the Leander, which developed as rowing became a central element of the culture of Thames-side public schools like Eton and Westminster.. Schoolboys took their enthusiasm to university and by the 1820s rowing races had begun in Oxford and Cambridge..The first Oxbridge boat race was held in 1829, with considerable wagers at stake; by 1845 it had, like the Derby, become an unofficial national holiday, with huge crowds packing the banks of the Thames..

The brief life of rowing as a commercial spectacle was finished by the late nineteenth century.. In part the sport was driven from England’s rivers by the ships of the industrial revolution and the arrival

Sculls are raced with one, two or four rowers, called singles, doubles and quads.. Sweeps are raced with two, four or eight rowers, called pairs, fours and eights.. In eights, a coxswain or cox sits at the back of the boat, steers the craft and directs the crew’s stroke rate.. In straight or coxless craft, the boat is directed by the steersman, a rower who has the rudder cable attached to a shoe..

Men compete in all of these boats, with an additional category of lightweight men (no one heavier than 70kg) in the coxless fours..Women compete in all boats except the coxless fours and have a lightweight event (no one heavier than 55kg) in the double sculls..

Sculls go faster than sweep boats with the same number of rowers, and the more rowers a boat has the faster it will be.. Men’s eights are capable of speeds up to 25kmh..

These are the classes:

Single scull. Length: 8.2m; Minimum weight: 14kg. Events: men and women. The single – or the skiff, as it is known in Europe – is the only individual event in rowing..There’s nowhere to hide..

Double scull. Length: 10.4m; Minimum weight: 27kg. Events: men, women and lightweight women.Like all pair events in rowing, double sculls seem to favour partnerships made up of different kinds of rowers:power rowers are often combined with more technical athletes.. Personal chemistry between the pair is crucial..

Quad scull. Length: 13.4m; Minimum weight: 52kg. Events: men and women. Eight blades and four rowers makes for the fastest boats after the eights.. Great precision and team work are required to keep time and avoid blade clashes..

Pair or Coxless pair. Length: 10.4m; Minimum weight: 27kg. Events: men and women. The coxless pair is technically among the most demanding of boats, responding poorly to any indiscriminate use of power.. Balance, stability and elegance are the watch words..

Four or Coxless four. Length: 13.4m; Minimum weight: 50kg. Events: men, lightweight men. The same balance of power and technique is required to get the best from this boat, but with

four rowers the level of complexity is even higher. .The crew spend more time rowing at maximum stroke rate than in any other class..

Eight. Length: 19m; Minimum weight: 96kg. Events: men and women.

Considered by many the premier regatta format – and the only coxed event at the Olympics – the eights is an unbelievably demanding competition with rowers close to four-minute mile pace and constantly on the verge of a lactic acid burn-out..

The Finer Points

The Rowing Stroke

Each stroke consists of four elements: the catch, in

which the oar is lowered into the water; the drive, in which the oar is pulled through the water as the rower slides back in their seat, driving the boat forward; the extraction, where the oar is lifted out of the water, and the slide or recovery, which returns the rower to his or her original position..After the extraction, the rower feathers the oar (rotates it through 90 degrees) to minimise air

resistance during the recovery..At the end of the slide, they square the blade, twisting it back into a sideways-on position before dropping the end into the water for the next catch..

It is crucial to remember that rowers sit on sliding seats, which allow them to contract and expand their bodies during the stroke sequence to maximise leverage..

Race Tactics

In running races athletes often choose to hang back,

gaining advantage from monitoring their opponents. . In rowing, where you face backwards,you want to be out front from the start, so you can see and cover any attack..

Nearly all crews will row fastest in the first 500m of the race at a stroke rate of around 45–48 a minute.. For the middle 1000m they drop down to around 35 strokes a minute and then pick the pace up again in the last 500m..

The explosive effort required to get the boat up to 48 stokes a minute means that rowing is a sport of strategic physiology. The opening 500m burns more oxygen than any athlete can take in: consequently they will experience the lactic acid build-up and muscle pain that comes with anaerobic respiration..

Rowers have to decide how much lactic acid they can tolerate and carry throughout the race, balancing the advantage of being ahead early on against the risk of complete fatigue due to lactate accumulation..Towards the finish the rate of energy consumption increases again as does the production of lactic acid.. If they time it correctly, the final stroke of the race is the last they are able to pull..

Rowing Goes to the Olympics

Cancelled due to bad weather at the inaugural

modern Olympics in 1896 (as were the sailing events), rowing made its debut at the Paris Games of 1900, in predictably chaotic fashion.. Disagreements over the rules saw two final runs for the men’s coxless fours, with two different boats awarded gold medals.. In the men’s coxed pairs, the Dutch team ditched their portly cox

after the semi-final and employed a more slender Parisian youth instead..They duly won the title..

St Louis 1904 was a near walkover for the home nation, as only a Canadian eight showed up from outside the USA, winning a silver medal..The oddball 1906 Intercalated Games saw a suitably eccentric rowing programme, including the six-man and seventeen-man naval rowing boats, the larger of which provided Greece’s first and only rowing gold..

The British teams won all the golds at London in 1908, when the regatta was held in Henley.. In the inter-war era the British haul declined, despite the best efforts of Jack Beresford, who won rowing medals at five consecutive Games (1920–36), including three golds. . Swiss and Italian teams won Olympic titles during this period, but the USA was the leading rowing nation, with John B. Kelly their leading rower..The son of an Irish immigrant, Kelly learnt his rowing while working as a bricklayer, and was excluded from competing at the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta because of his status as an artisan.. Undaunted, he went on to win two golds at the 1920 Antwerp Games and a third in 1924.. His son Jack would win a bronze rowing medal at the 1956 Games, while his daughter Grace would wind up as Princess Grace of Monaco..A more conventional Harvard eight of the era, winners of the gold in 1924, included Benjamin Spock, the future child care guru..

Masters of the Riververse:

The USA’s Rowing and Ruling Elites

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are best known as the Harvard graduates who received $65 million from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, in a lawsuit that tried to resolve who owned and who invented which bit of the ubiquitous social media site. But they are also top-class sportsmen:while at college they were the engine room of a Harvard men’s eight that won the US national championship and finished sixth at the world cup in 2006.The twins went on to compete in the coxless pair at Beijing

in 2008, finishing 6th.

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The Winklevosses are just the latest in a long line of blue bloods in American rowing. Both

Yale and Harvard have supplied gold-winning eights to the US team. Other competitive rowers from America’s ruling and celebrity elites include Secretary of State Dean

Acheson (Yale), Averill

Harriman (Yale), Admiral

Chester Nimitz (Navy), the actors Gregory Peck (Cal-Berkeley) and

Vincent Price (Yale), President Teddy Roosevelt (Harvard) and astronaut Alan B. Shepard (Navy).

A change in the balance of power became clear in 1936, when the Germans won five of the seven events, but in the post-war era the dominance of northern Europe (Switzerland, Ger-

many and Scandinavia) and the Angolophone nations (USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia) began to weaken.. Up

against a rigidly amateur or college-based framework in the West, the new state professionals of East Germany and the Soviet Union became increasingly successful..Vyacheslav Ivanov won three consecutive gold medals in the single scull (1956–64) with his blistering turn of speed.. East Germany peaked at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, where they won eleven of the fourteen rowing titles on offer..

Since the break-up of the Soviet Bloc the rowing fortunes of Eastern Europe have declined, with the exception of the women’s teams from Romania: no rower has won more medals than Elisa- beta Lipa, who has claimed five golds (1984, and 1992–2004) in three different classes.. Katerin Boron of Germany runs her close, though: she won four straight golds between 1992 and 2004 and only just missed out on a fifth at Beijing..

SHOOT ME NOW: HAVING FORESWORN ROWING FOUR YEARS EARLIER, STEVE REDGrave WINS A FIFTH GOLD IN THE MEN’S COXLESS FOUR, SYDNEY 2000

In men’s rowing the dominant figure has been Britain’s Steve Redgrave, the only rower to win five gold medals at consecutive Olympics (1984–2000).. Mathew Pinsent, his team mate for three of those golds, went on to win a fourth himself in 2004, in a coxless four..Together they have helped trigger a considerable revival in British rowing..

Australia’s ‘oarsome foursome’ (originally Nick Green, James Tomkins, Mike McKay and Sam Patten; Patten was re-

placed by Andrew Cooper in 1991–92 and he by Drew Ginn in 1995), won the men’s coxless fours in 1992 and 1996, and brought a dash of populism to a sport which has remained rather narrowly based.. It was only in 2004 that the first black African rower, Kenya’s Ibrahim Githaiga, took part in an Olympic rowing regatta..

Why Watch Sailing?

Once the preserve of aristocrats and millionaires,

Olympic sailing has become a somewhat more open and democratic sport in recent decades: standardised equipment has reduced the costs of participation, and since its Olympic debut in 1900 the sport has been open to women as well as men. . Nonetheless, sailing retains much of the élan and glamour of its high-society origins, while offering a complex and compelling

spectacle, combining tactical sophistication and athleticism

with the unpredictability of wind and wave..What it does not offer is a decent experience for the live viewer: in 2012, as usual, the races will be so far from the shore that television will provide the best seat in the house..

The Story of Sailing

The word yacht derives from the Dutch word jaghte,

itself derived from the verb jagen, to hunt or pursue. . In the seventeenth century the Netherlands was arguably the leading maritime nation in the world, with fleets of advanced sailing ships criss-crossing the oceans for both trade and war.. One of the ways in which the Dutch spent their new-found wealth was by messing about in boats at home: the wealthy delighted in building sumptuously fitted jaghte for gentle cruises, parties, parades and mock battles..They did not, however, race them..

An injection of competitive spirit was introduced, as ever, by the British.. Charles ii was in exile in the Netherlands when the monarchy was restored in 1660, and he returned to London in a yacht gifted to him by the Prince of Orange.. Charles was entranced by his new toy, as was his younger brother, the Duke of York.. Back home, each commissioned a version of the ship, and named it after his wife..The two vessels were raced against each other in October 1661, and the British aristocracy soon followed suit, racing their yachts on rivers and down the coast, for honour, pleasure and – above all – wagers..