THE BIRTH OF ENGLISH ORTHODOXY The most important factor in determining how much work an oarsman does is his length in the water. The longer the stroke, the more work he does, and this can vary at the whim of the individual rower or coach. By adjusting how far the athlete reaches or lays back, one can shorten or lengthen the resulting stroke at will. The most important factor in determining the perceived heaviness or lightness of rowing load is the ratio of the distance the handle travels in the boat versus the distance the blade travels in the water. The longer the blade travels in the water for a given amount of handle travel, the heavier it feels. You have more leverage, and it feels easier if the blade travels even a little bit less distance with the same handle motion. The relationship between handle travel and blade travel mostly depends upon the inboard/outboard ratio, the ratio of oar length inboard of the fulcrum to oar length outboard of the fulcrum, which is determined by the particular placement of the collar on the oar shaft. Nowadays, this ratio can be micro- managed in minutes by simply adjusting the overall length of the oar and/or by moving the collar. With some oars, it can even be done during practice on the water, but for most of rowing history, including the entire 19th Century, oar length was fixed, and collars were permanently attached to the shafts by their manufacturer. illustration on prior page. In addition, since it was necessary to have the handle of the oar traveling more or less in front of the rower during the stroke, the inboard length of the oar has to be coordinated with the distance of the thole pin outboard from the rower’s position on the thwart. In sweep rowing, this distance is called spread in the United States or span in Great Britain, and for the first one hundred fifty years of rowing history, it also could not be adjusted easily after the boat had left its manufacturer. Therefore, once length of body swing was settled upon by the coach, all other aspects of load were completely and inflexibly determined by the equipment. There is only so much work that an athlete of any era is capable of repeating stroke after stroke. There is only so much distance through the water that rowers can pull through during the average stroke, so since Egan could not change the load on the oars, once he had settled upon his long-reach approach, he had to steer clear of too long layback in order not to overload his athletes. Elimination of the Ferryman’s Finish Additional changes to the stroke cascaded from Egan’s release of the knees as the athlete reached forward. Reduction of the long layback used in the London style and in the waterman’s stroke obviated the great need for a ferryman’s finish, which watermen used in order to laboriously return their bodies to vertical, and which was ridiculed by gentleman rowers of the time, who considered it inelegant, counter- intuitive and counter-productive. Principles of Rowing: “Doubling the See body over at the end of the stroke . . . is both a very ugly and a very bad fault.”384 In describing single sculling in 1866, the anonymous Edwin Brickwood,385 author of another very early surviving British rowing manual, The Arts of Rowing and Training,386 stated: “The body should 384 Ibid, p. 13 385 See Chapter 8. 386 the third surviving rowing manual after Egan’s and Shadwell’s Principles of Rowing and an 1852 work by J.S. Bateman, mentioned below. Brickwood’s 1866 work was also written 107
