THE BIRTH OF CLASSICAL TECHNIQUE Warin in extending slide length, he was telling only the first chapter. However, it was his time practicing the pendulum method on fourteen-inch slides that perhaps laid the foundation for his later success on twenty-three and ultimately twenty-six inch slides. Jim Joy: “Hanlan serves as an excellent example of an athlete who is a keen observer of his own body movements and the movement of the shell. . . . From old photographs of Hanlan, his erect yet relaxed posture and totally extended body are evident.”645 Adjusting the Load But solving one problem with longer slides in 1875 had created another problem unforeseen by George Warin, the builder of Hanlan’s first shell. His longer slide had created a longer stroke in the water, and his longer stroke had created a heavier load. This was the same problem that had confronted T.S. Egan at Cambridge four decades earlier when he adopted the longer- reach stroke he had observed in Metropolitan crews.646 Hanlan came up with a solution. Hanlan: “At that time, the standard oar was 10 feet 3 inches [312cm] long, with three inch [wide] blades. I got from Mr. Warin a pair of sculls 9 feet 6 inches [290cm] long, with six and one-quarter inch blades. “They called me ‘the kid with the big sculls,’ and the other rowing men laughed at me when I appeared on the scene with the new oars.”647 Interestingly, what his competitors noticed was the wider blades. Hanlan’s more important innovation was in changing the load. The standard scull of the day was 645 Joy, Hanlan, pp. 5-6 646 See Chapter 6. 647 Hanlan, p. 3 123” long with 30” 76cm inboard with the center of area of the blade approximately 12” from the tip, yielding a load ratio648 of about 2.8. Hanlan’s new oars were 114” with 32” 81cm inboard,649 but the center of area of his blade would have been several inches closer to the tip. By removing eleven inches from the outboard loom of his oars, he had lowered his load ratio to below 2.3, an almost indescribably huge reduction which allowed him to row a smooth, accelerating pullthrough through the much longer arc created by his pendulum swing. This was much of Hanlan’s secret! In 1897, he described his advantages over his opponents in Philadelphia in 1876 to journalist Harry Clay Palmer. Hanlan: “I was a better sculler than any of them, in a scientific point of view, and I had a better rig than any of them. I had studied the art of sculling and improved my fittings. I had a longer slide than any of them, I had a shorter foot-brace [footstretchers placed closer to his stern stops] than any of them, I also had shorter oars. “Everything they had was on the lines of the old style of rowing. I improved on the old English rigging; I altered the rigging of my boat, except the old thole pins. Swivel oarlocks were not thought much of then. I bought myself new oars, and altered the angle of my foot-brace from about twenty [degrees] to about forty [degrees], and these little things helped me. I did this without any previous teaching. “My style of rowing was then far ahead of that of anybody else, and with the alterations I had made it would have been a wonderfully strong young fellow who would have beat me.”650 648 per Purcer, p. 17, load ratio is defined at outboard minus 2cm over inboard plus 2cm. 649 Crowther, p. 243 650 Qtd. by Palmer, p. 661 173
