The Independent Rowing News

Streaming video and sites like YouTube are bringing classic rowing contests to the masses. But has our sport lost something along the way?

When he died last year, journalist David Halberstam was at work on a new book about the 1958 NFL Championship game. Halberstam, who wrote The Amateurs about four men competing for places on the 1984 U.S. Olympic sculling team, had a nose for great sports stories. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that a spate of others took up his topic.

In his review for The New York Times, Richard Sandomir had generally good things to say about the recent books and a television documentary about the game, but was rather less complimentary of the contest itself. In the media vacuum before SportsCenter and ESPN Classic, he says, word-of-mouth carried the game’s legends to new heights. Had the field not been packed with future Hall of Famers, or if a controversial call had not sent the game into overtime, it would have been a mere footnote.

The review caught my attention because rowing has dozens of past races that, like the 1958 NFL title game, have grown larger in legend than in life. Something unforgettable would happen with a few dozen or hundreds watching, and word would slowly trickle out to the rest of the rowing world, the drama building with each telling.

Thus Peter Michael Kolbe vs. Pertti Karppinen is not merely the great rivalry of the last generation. It is a legend, something that we heard the old way, in the oral tradition. We might as well have been sitting in a mead hall as a bard sang out the tale of Beowulf.

Think about the twice-rowed Henley final in 1989 between the Harvard varsity heavyweights and a group of elite British lightweights, rowing in their Nottingham County club colors. Harvard was coming off an undefeated season, but the lightweights blazed to a new course record, destroying the heavily favored Crimson who soon discovered a piece of wood had fouled their skeg. The Stewards ordered a re-row. The lightweights (who some versions of the yarn claim, falsely, had to be retrieved from the pub) won again, setting another course record. The tale spread over the weeks and years, becoming a favorite of club rowers, lightweights, the British, and people who don’t care for Harvard. Nearly 20 years later they still talk about it.

Now we have YouTube, and everything has changed. The big races are on streaming video, often live but rarely more than a few days delayed. Last August, rowers all over North America spent their waking hours in a daze, having risen in the middle of the night to stream the Olympic rowing races on nbcolympics.com. Beijing is 7,000 miles and 12 hours removed from the U.S. East Coast, which means a lot less than it used to. Steve Tucker, a former Olympian and current training partner of U.S. single sculler Michelle Guerette, organized a viewing of the Olympic final in the Riverside boathouse in Boston, at 3 a.m. Guerette’s coach, Charley Butt, called in on his cell from the racecourse, providing real-time play-by-play as he followed the race on his bicycle.

Likewise, when the racing at the 2008 IRA Regatta attained instant-classic status, rowing fans were as likely to hear the news via email or the Web as they were to get it word-of-mouth at the boathouse. And if they got it on email, chances are it came with a YouTube link.

Yet, when I raced in the 1993 world championships, my friends and family didn’t know the result until I called my brother three days later. (Phoning the States from Prague was more complicated in those days, and the result wasn’t anything I was in a hurry to share.) That was also the first time I saw Steve Redgrave row, or, for that matter, the Italian quad and the Romanian women’s eight. I had read about those crews and studied their photographs. As a coach, I’d held them up to my athletes as examples. But I had never flown to a European regatta or answered the ad in the back of the old USRowing magazine to have a Betamax tape sent to my door, which at the time were the only ways to see those crews in action.

When I finally saw Redgrave on the racecourse I was surprised at the imperfections in his stroke, and blown away by the absolute focus he brought to the contest. I thought the same about Elisabeta Lipa and her Romanian eight, and it made me think that I’d been teaching my athletes the wrong things all along. These weren’t paragons of technical excellence. These were athletes who knew how to get their legs down, and above all, how to get to the line before the other crews did. I felt like I had missed something.

The internet has changed that. Seeing really great rowing is as easy as typing “Drew Ginn and Duncan Free” into your YouTube search box. If you want to know how to race beyond yourself, click on the 2008 Olympic pairs final that pops up with that search, but don’t watch Ginn and Free. Watch the Canadians who chase them to the finish.

Speaking of finishes, if yours is a little rough, punch up Xeno Mueller’s instructional rowing videos—just be sure to replay Mueller’s duel with Rob Waddell in the 2000 Olympic singles final. That will lead you to the 1996 singles final, in which Mueller unleashes one of the greatest sprints in Olympic rowing history. But then you’ll want to see the absolute best sprint, which for my money is Jonny and Greg Searle’s 1992 shocker against the legendary Abbagnale brothers of Italy. The Neapolitans had owned the coxed pair for a decade, even beating Steve Redgrave and Andy Holmes in 1988, when Sir Steve was at his best and doubled into the coxed pair.

By the way, if you ever get sick of hearing about Steve Redgrave, just check out that 1988 Olympic straight pairs race, after which you’ll be the one talking. That takes us all the way back to 1984, to Kolbe-Karppinen II, and to the men’s doubles race that served as the climactic scene in Halberstam’s The Amateurs. You know what happens, but you owe it to yourself to watch.

Finally, search the web for that fabled 1989 Harvard-Nott’s County re-row, but if you find it don’t tell me. The reality could never match the legend.

By Jeff Moag