THE SPORT OF ROWING Fairbairn was a man of infinite ego, and especially in the two decades before his death in 1938, he would publish prolifically on all facets of rowing. According to his son, Ian Fairbairn, “he was sincerely convinced that somehow or other he had learnt the truth about rowing and owed it to other men to teach them that truth.”866 And apparently he felt he owed it to them not to mince words. He called the English Orthodoxy he confronted upon his return “Awfuldoxy”867 and once wrote that rowing techniques in England were like the seasons in Australia, “bad, damned bad and bloody awful.”868 Many believe that in the century since 1903, Fairbairn has become the single most influential coach in rowing history. According to Yale University coach, Steve Gladstone, “There’s nobody within three lengths of him!”869 He has certainly been the most controversial and the most polarizing figure who ever pulled an oar, raised a megaphone or put pen to paper. There truly is nobody within three lengths of him! Fairbairn was a “Naturalist.”870 In Fairbairn’s given situation, and this is very important when applied to skills. Geoffrey Page: “Steve taught his oarsmen to think of the end product rather than a predetermined conscious pattern of movement. He asked them to concentrate on bladework and left them to work out how best to do it.”871 In Fairbairn’s opinion, the difference between his own approach and the rigidity of post-Golden Age English Orthodoxy was “the difference between Prussian Militarism and natural action.”872 Karl Adam (1912-1976) was a revolutionary mid-20th Century German coach who will be discussed at length later in this book.873 He was strongly influenced by Steve and recognized the Fairbairn approach as cybernetics, the study of how organisms coordinate complex tasks, rather than biomechanics, the application of the principles of mechanics to the study of human motion. Karl Adam: “The original [English Orthodox] method of teaching rowing through a progress from one position to another on a machine was like learning a song note-by-note rather than by learning the melody.”874 opinion, English Orthodox coaches had devolved into teaching body mechanics and rigid posture instead of teaching rowing. He told his rowers to concentrate on what their blades should be doing and let their bodies naturally take care of themselves. He believed that the subconscious mind knows better than the conscious mind what it should do in any 866 Fairbairn On Rowing, p. 18 867 Edwards, p. 19 868 Mendenhall, Ch. XVI, p. 4 869 Gladstone, personal conversation, 2004 870 Dodd, World Rowing, p. 84 English Orthodoxy versus Classical Technique Both approaches to rowing technique have always had the same goal: moving boats. They have just gone about achieving it from opposite philosophical directions. Even though they did not really disagree on any truly fundamental aspect of technique, English Orthodoxy had become process- 871 Geoffrey Page, qtd. by Dodd, World Rowing, p. 162 872 Fairbairn On Rowing, p. 132 873 See Chapter 92. 874 Adam, p. 3 230
