THE SPORT OF ROWING sculling, and the norm was out-and-back races over three to four miles. For colleges, the preferred boat was the coxless-six, which was hard to steer and could not easily manage a turn around a stake. By the 1870s, three-mile straightaway races on the Connecticut River in Springfield, Massachusetts or on Saratoga Lake in upstate New York had become the preferred venues for RAAC championship regattas. Bob Cook had held as his ideal the annual Oxford and Cambridge four-plus- mile Boat Race in London rowed in eight- oared shells with coxswains, which he had seen and come to appreciate during his trip. In 1873, with Cook newly returned from Britain, Yale won the RAAC championship in Springfield, but when the regatta moved to Lake Saratoga in the following years, Cook quickly became disenchanted. By this time, Columbia, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Williams, Cornell, Trinity and Princeton all had professional coaches. Championship regattas were evolving to resemble less and less Cook’s ideal: the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, two crews coached by amateurs racing head-to- head over four miles. In 1874 while rowing in second place, poor steering caused Yale to be fouled by Harvard. They broke their starboard bow oar and came in ninth. Columbia won. Historian Samuel Crowther, Jr.: “Yale was very much disgruntled after this regatta, and the feeling between Harvard and Yale was especially bitter. “The coxless-sixes were not the most satisfactory of craft, and there was too often the chance that a boat manned by a fast crew might be beaten because of the inability to find a man who could steer. “Captain Cook wanted Yale to withdraw [from future RAAC championship regattas], claiming there were too many crews in the races to make the test one of rowing ability. “The matter came to a head at the next meeting of the association when Hamilton and Union asked for admission. Yale voted against them and said that they would withdraw after the next regatta. They gave as a reason the fact that the great number of competitors in the regatta made the racing unsatisfactory, but the real cause for their withdrawal seemed to be their dislike of being beaten by smaller, less prestigious colleges.”1214 Early Race Strategy in American Collegiate Rowing These races could have as many as fifteen crews starting side by side, and this had an interesting influence on race strategy in the United States. Since your opponent’s lane might be as far away from you as 300 meters across the river or lake, it was easier to see them and keep track of them through your peripheral vision, even if they got a lead. This made falling behind in the early stages of a race less of a psychological disadvantage, and in a race that lasted more than fifteen minutes, it made a crew that started too fast vulnerable to attack in the late stages by a crew that had paced itself more conservatively. The fly-and-die strategy that had characterized virtually all early racing throughout history up to that time was quickly driven to extinction by natural selection.1215 Crews quickly learned by experience that the most successful strategy was to go off the line hard to take advantage of adrenalin flowing and to grab a brief psychological advantage if possible, but then settle to a manageable pace for the body of the race and be ready to increase that pace 1214 Crowther, pp. 49-53 1215 See the Introduction. 320
