ENGLISH ORTHODOX MEETS CLASSICAL TECHNIQUE Historian Chris Dodd: “A picture of him holding the coxswain in his arms hung in the Jesus boathouse until it burned down in 1932.”726 Perhaps partially explaining his prickly personality, on his second day out sculling at Cambridge in 1881, the same day that he won the freshman hammer throw and shot- put, “he had a head-on collision with another sculler, the other boat striking him within an inch of his spine. Two feet of its bow broke off and were left sticking into Steve, and he reckoned that he had a blood cyst for thirty- five years after this as a result of the doctor not getting all the bits of wood out of his back. It caused him a lot of pain and nervous dyspepsia, to which he was a self- confessed martyr ever onwards.”727 In Steve’s last two years rowing for Cambridge, they won the Boat Race both times, in 1886 taking the rating up to 40 for the last three minutes and coming back from three lengths down to a legendary win by two-thirds of a length at the line. In both years, Steve rowed in the 5- seat.728 In 1890, J.A. Watson-Taylor, Eton and Magdalene, Captain of C.U.B.C. in 1881, described the Cambridge technique during the Fairbairn era: “If I were to compare the Cambridge and Oxford crews, I would say that the main difference, in Cambridge’s favor, is that Cambridge men sit the boat better and use their legs better. A Cambridge crew looks more a part of the shell than an Oxford crew, and at the finish of the stroke you will see the knees of the Oxford men show up, while the Cambridge men finish with their legs straight and thus get a stronger finish. . . . Cambridge has a longer [body] swing, also, and she gets a 726 Dodd, Henley, p. 132 727 Ibid 728 Rowe & Pitman, pp. 308-9 grip on the water at full reach, keeping an even power right through the stroke [Schubschlag]; while Oxford is inclined to mark the beginning of the stroke emphatically, which tends to a letting up in the middle [two-part segmented Kernschlag]. “Some men say, ‘Mark the beginning of the stroke!’ but I cannot concur in this, and there are few now who believe in it. What a man wants to do is to cover his blade at once (wasting no time) by raising his hands quickly, then put all his weight on the oar, and grind it through with his legs. He should lift the whole weight of his body on to the oar, off the stretcher. The shoulders do the work more rapidly than the legs, and really begin work first, but when the legs begin their exertion, it is a question of driving the oar through evenly and with all the force possible. “As the arms are coming to the body at the end of the stroke, there is a certain amount of muscular exertion on their part, but not much. If a man tries to use his arms much in a four-mile race, he will find they will give out, and then he is of little use. The last kick of the legs is given as the arms are being drawn in toward the body, but there is nothing marked about it.729”730 Fairbairn’s innovative approach to technique brought about a sea change to rowing in the Boat Race, but it by no means drove English Orthodoxy to extinction. It must be remembered that at no time were the majority of British rowers even aware of the existence of Classical Technique or of Steve Fairbairn. If Steve coached at Jesus, 729 We shall discover that even though this paragraph concerning arm usage may or may not be an accurate description of the 1880s Cambridge technique, it does not conform to Fairbairn’s later coaching, thinking or writing. See Chapter 19. 730 Qtd. by Rowing at Universities, The New York Times, March 2, 1890 195
