THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN ROWING and Boston Athletic Association. He was still in Cambridge in 1897 during the tenure of Rudie Lehmann1731 as Harvard coach, and he carefully observed the technique and equipment that Lehmann employed. In 1904, he took over as head crew coach at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and he stayed there for more than two decades. It was there that he made his most lasting contribution to rowing history, beginning an American winning streak in Olympic eights that would last for thirty-six years, the longest ever. The Glendon Stroke In 1932, historian Robert F. Kelley related the legend of the birth of the Glendon Stroke as follows: “In those days, before the advent of high-powered coaching launches, the coach had to follow along in his single and coach from that. “Glendon, on one occasion, found it harder than usual to stay up with his men and thought of the long British [back] swing [being practiced at Harvard in these years immediately after the coaching tenure of Foxey Bancroft]. He wondered how that deep follow-through would go with the American length of slide, and so he tried it out. “He seemed to be having less difficulty, so he tried teaching it to his four-oared crew. That crew beat one using the old-fashioned stroke, and there began the building up of the one really unique American stroke.”1732 Paraphrasing Richard Glendon himself, journalist George Carens described a more personal and plausible source of inspiration: When he began his coaching career, “he taught oarsmen what he called the dory- 1731 See Chapters 16 and 35. 1732 Kelley, p. 221 style of rowing, taken, he said, from the way Cape Codders row their dories1733.”1734 The New York Times: “He came to his profession by way of deep water.”1735 According to Dr. Walter Peet, coach of Columbia University and a contemporary of Glendon’s, “This clever coach has worked along the ideas of the old professional sculler and has thrown all other theories to the wind.”1736 Here is the Glendon Stroke described in Glendon’s own words: The catch “should be made quickly but not jerkily, by reversing the swing of the body and quickly raising the hands. . . With the catch, the trunk of the body is thrown upward and backward to an angle not less than -45° with the keel of the boat [i.e., not more than -45° past vertical], the leg-drive blending with the body-swing throughout the pull. “Throughout the stroke, the body must swing directly over the keel, and an equalized leg-drive must be maintained during the pull. “[Long layback] allows the oarsman to obtain a stronger finish.”1737 As has been described in detail in earlier chapters, during the last decades of the 19th and first decades of the 20th Century, Harvard and Yale were still using versions of English Orthodox Technique, Harvard in the memory of Bancroft and Lehmann, and Yale in the memory of Cook. Glendon called his technique “American Orthodox,” as it combined long 1733 a thirty-foot boat rowed by eight sweep rowers and used by mackerel schooners in the open ocean to set and retrieve their nets. – per Saint Sing, op.cit., p. 14 1734 George Carens, Glendon Rowing Legend, qtd. by Saint Sing, Breakthrough Kinesis, p. 99 1735 Richard Glendon, Crew Coach, Dead, The New York Times, July 10, 1956 1736 Peet, p. 98 1737 Glendon, pp. 99-101 461
