AMERICAN ROWING COMES OF AGE 2004. Under each photo was Cook’s own description of the phase of the stroke being illustrated. Force application was Kernschlag. The [1897] Yale-Harvard-Cornell Regatta Program: “The feature of the Cook Stroke is the catch. The men reach well forward and catch the water with a savageness that seems to fairly lift the boat. The oars enter the water at right angles, but are not buried deep. “There is not a great amount of leg kick, the body and arms being relied upon for most of the power. The power is applied continually, and the finish has little or any of the usual ‘boil.’”1206 The summary of the Bob Cook Stroke is as follows: 0°, +30° to -10°, 4-9, 0-5, 5-10, Kernschlag. This was a close adaptation of the overlapping-sequential pre-Fairbairn English Orthodoxy but, in force application, it failed to appreciate the new innovation that Cook’s British mentor, Francis Gulston,1207 had introduced to the English Orthodox Technique of the 1870s. According to Mendenhall, “before Gulston was to learn the enormous possibilities of the sliding seat, he had realized that fixed-seat rowing was attaching so much importance to the beginning of the stroke that the finish was neglected. “A ‘clean, lengthy finish’ became the secret of his early success, so that no one was better prepared to take proper advantage of the new technology.”1208 Five years before Ned Hanlan would arrive from Canada, eight years before Steve Fairbairn would arrive from Australia, F.C. Gulston was one of the Metropolitan rowers 1206 The[1897] Yale-Harvard-Cornell Regatta Program, pp. 26-7 1207 See Chapter 8. 1208 Mendenhall, unpublished biography of Bob Cook, Mystic Seaport Library, pp. 21-2 from Thames and London Rowing Clubs who were winning at Henley and, like Joe Sadler, starting to push technique in the direction that Hanlan would eventually take it.1209 The Bob Cook Stroke would fail to incorporate Gulston’s appreciation of the pullthrough as a whole and maintained its focus on the front half. Evolution Cook began with pure English Orthodoxy as he understood it and evolved from that starting point over the following twenty years in the directions that virtually all American collegiate rowing of the time shared. Without the decades of British history of fixed-seat rowing, American rowers never acquired the English Orthodox preoc- cupation with extreme body swing and so were immediately more open to longer and longer slides. The longer slides presented a specific challenge for boat builders. Foot stretchers were always adjusted so that when the legs were flat at the end of the pullthrough, the seat would come to rest at or near the bow stops of the slide. Lengthening the slide resulted in the foot stretchers being bolted in closer and closer to stern end of the track. Soon the horizontal braces between gunwale and keelson at that point began impinging more and more on the backs of the rower’s calves. The solution was to lessen the angle of the footstretchers, allowing the heels to rise a bit, and to build the tracks on a slope, dropping their stern ends just a bit. (English critics scoffed at how Americans “rowed uphill.”1210) As the slides lengthened, stroke length increased, and this encouraged a lower 1209 See Chapter 14. 1210 Rowe & Pitman, pp. 66-7 317
