Race Strategy It should be recalled that through the THE SPORT OF ROWING 1956 The 1956 Soviet Olympic Trials were a 1950s the common strategy was to aggressively take the lead early in the race and crack your opponent, and this was also the Soviet approach. An integral component was their high stroke rate, and their pullthroughs were impressive during practice and early in their races when their entry-to-release acceleration was still consistent and effective. Unfortunately, their race pace seemed to mirror their approach to a single stroke: “Hit it hard, and see what happens.”3105 When they got tired, they tended not to be able to make it to the finish, either of their strokes or of their races. If their opponents had cracked first, then they won. If not, they lost, sometimes spectacularly. At the 1952 Olympics, Krylya Sovetov first came up against the U.S. in their semi- final. When the Americans started to inch away, the Soviets cracked, almost stopped rowing and lost by twelve seconds. In the final, the two boats were even through the 1,000 when the Americans put in a power- 10. That ended the race. The Soviets eventually ceded half a length of open water and were almost caught by the Australians. In the 1955 Henley Double Sculls Challenge Cup, Thomi Keller and Grasshopper/Zurich cracked first, and Klub Burevestnik won, but they also collapsed and slowed down as soon as their rivals had begun to fall back. In the semi-finals for the 1955 Grand Challenge Cup, the Klub Krasnoe Eight cracked while leading and were rowed down from behind by UBC/Vancouver R.C.3106 case of dominoes. Defending 1952 Olympic singles champion Yuri Tyukalov failed to win the singles, and so he teamed with newcomer Aleksandr Berkutov and won the Doubles Trials. That forced Helsinki and Henley double scullers Emchuk and Zhilin into a coxed-pair with coxswain Vladimir Petrov. The man who began the dominoes falling by winning the Singles Trials was 18- year-old Vyacheslav Ivanov.3107 At the 1956 Olympics, Emchuk /Zhilin/Petrov won coxed-pairs Bronze behind Ayrault/Findlay/Seifert of the U.S.3108 In the coxless-pairs, Buldakov/Viktor Ivanov, two-time Henley winners and two-time European Champions, came in second to Fifer/Hecht of the United States.3109 Tyukalov/Berkutov, a simply gorgeous combination, won the doubles, and Vyacheslav Ivanov won the singles. Altogether, Soviet rowers had won a total of three Gold, two Silver and one Bronze in two Olympic Games, mostly in small boats. Mature Moscow Style By 1964 in Tokyo, the USSR Olympic Single, Double, both Pairs, both Fours and Eight all rowed a more mature and nuanced version of the Moscow Style. The recovery had moderated somewhat. There was less “windmill,” and the concurrent pullthroughs relied more heavily on the legs. They approached the entry with shoulders and heads low, leaning the bodies forward +25° and bending the inside elbows. 3105 Babraj, op. cit. 3106 who were then narrowly defeated in the final by Pennsylvania. See Chapter 65. 3107 See Chapter 86. 3108 See Chapter 82. 3109 See Chapter 81. 866
