THE SPORT OF ROWING In retrospect, this exchange captured a conversation that would continue into the 21st Century. The English Orthodox view that leg drive and back swing are separate functions is still heard today. The view that the two must be integrated and coordinated remains underappreciated throughout the world, including parts of Britain. English Orthodox Technique actually remained remarkably unchanged throughout the transition to sliding seats, and in retrospect the reasons were actually quite simple. Orthodox rowers on their bench seats had evolved to value two things above all else: length in the water, and the long, elegant swing of the upper body. Brickwood and Gulston proved that early sliding seats increased length in the water, but at the cost of around ten percent of body angle forward, as demonstrated in the historic photos on the previous page. Sliding seats any longer than nine inches or so would even more significantly limit body swing forward because the further an oarsman slid on his seat, the higher his knees inevitably rose. The higher his knees rose, the less his body could swing forward before his chest and thighs came together, thus limiting more and more the signature Orthodox body reach forward, the foundation of the “handsome, long swing of fixed-seat rowing.”452 Orthodox followers were suspicious of any innovation which could compromise their imposing, graceful body swing. Eton rowing historians Bryne & Churchill: “Slides were considered inelegant. They were dirty, and when no longer dirty they were noisy. Besides, the spectacle of eight pairs of knees rising simultaneously was to be deprecated.”453 In the following quote, pre-sliding seat English Orthodox Technique is described 452 Mendenhall, p. 10 453 Byrne & Churchill, p. 216 nostalgically from the post-sliding seat perspective of 1935: “Fixed seat rowing had by 1872 reached a high degree of perfection, its strong point being perhaps the free swing forward from the hips, which is said by eyewitnesses to have made the stroke almost as long as it afterwards became on the slide.”454 For decades, in fact, “they thought of the slide as only an extension, however important, of fixed-seat rowing,”455 and it was standard practice to continue to teach novices on fixed benches. The Lesson of the Sliding Seat Change is by definition anathema to any and all forms of orthodoxy in every phase of human culture. One example of the difficulty that English Orthodoxy would eventually have in staying relevant and adapting to new challenges had already manifested itself as early as the 1870s with its resistance to the sliding seat. According to C.R.L. Fletcher, under Dr. Edmond Warre,456 Eton College “won the Ladies’ Plate [at Henley] eight times, 1864, ‘6, ‘7, ‘8, ‘9, 1870, 1882, ‘4. There was thus a long gap, 1870-82, of failure, but it was during this period of defeat that the sliding seat first came to be used, and good conservative as he was, Warre found it difficult to pass this milestone.’457 Byrne & Churchill: “The earlier Eton crews are said to have rowed on four-inch or at the most six-inch slides, while their opponents were using eight-inch and later ten-inch, and by 1880 or sooner the malady of formalism, which occasionally attacks all the better types of rowing, began, causing the rejection of those whose backs were not 454 Ibid. 455 Fairbairn On Rowing, p. 23 456 See Chapter 16. 457 Fletcher, p. 278 124
