AMERICAN ROWING COMES OF AGE Ellis Ward had his tracks extended beyond this further toward the stern. Making use of such tracks is called rowing “through the pin,” and it allowed the Penn crew to compress their legs so far that the Henley photo shows their shins pushed well past vertical. Ellis Ward’s brother, Al Ward, would build eights with similar extended tracks for Annapolis coach Richard Glendon during the first decades of the 20th Century.1376 During the 1950s, Karl Adam, a coach in West Germany would reintroduce this innovation.1377 Technique In his youth, historian Samuel Crowther, Jr. (1880-1947) was a member of the Penn Varsity Squad from 1899 to 1901. He considered Ellis Ward’s approach a new American Technique: “The reach is with the elbows at the knees, which are well apart. The catch is made firmly, but after the oar is in the water [backsplash entry]. The oar does not strike the water with force as in many of the harder catches of old [an undisguised criticism of Charles Courtney’s Extended Body Swing Style of the time1378]. “As the body rises, the knees come together, and when the body reaches the perpendicular, the legs are slammed down, and by the time the slide has reached the limit, the body has swung just beyond the perpendicular. “The arms must be kept straight and merely act as lines connecting the oar with the body until the finish, when they are to be used to bring the oar to the body, and the oar is brought in sharply, but without apparent effort – no jerk. [i.e., no ferryman’s finish]”1379 1376 See Chapter 51. 1377 See Chapter 92. 1378 See Chapter 33. 1379 Crowther, pp. 208, 213 University of Pennsylvania Intercollegiate Athletics Samuel Crowther in 1899 The New York Times: “Mr. Ward’s stroke, rowed by Pennsylvania, is described by him as follows: ‘We are rowing the longest stroke on the river, averaging 34, going to 36 on spurts of 10s, then dropping back to 34. The men are reaching further than any other crew, although they do not move their bodies so much as the others, but use the full length of the slide – twenty-two inches. This can be seen by watching the angle of the oars, and not the bodies. “The leg drive is also greatest of all the crews here. The forward reach finds the legs well drawn up to the armpits, the back almost perpendicular, and the arms at full stretch. 363
