THE SPORT OF ROWING train in until they had adjusted to the thin air. I helped. “Only a few countries really knew altitude training. The East Germans also used the two altitude sites, but never at the same time as the Westies.”4242 Equipment Karl Adam encouraged European boatbuilders to manufacture equipment suited to his technique: longer oars with adjustable collars and shovel-shaped blades,4243 longer slides, shorter hulls, different geometries, adjustable riggers, Carcano rig.4244 One irony about the so-called Ratzeburg equipment revolution was that when the team visited the United States in 1963,4245 they borrowed an American Pocock shell, the Nelson F. Cox, from Princeton. Karl- Heinrich von Groddeck was quoted several times saying that they had preferred that boat to all others except perhaps their Karlisch boat at home.4246 During a trip to the Antipodes in the mid-’70s, Stan Pocock happened upon the Karlisch boat that New Zealand had rowed to the 1972 Olympic Championship.4247 Pocock: “I ran my rule over it. The boat could just as well have been the Nelson F. Cox, the shell liked so much by the Ratzeburgers when they raced it in 1963. They must have returned home raving about it and asking Karlisch for more boats like it. “That Karlisch in New Zealand was identical to what we called our 22” standard lightweight eight, down to the minutest detail. The sole difference – it was one inch deeper to accommodate a heavier crew.”4248 Precedents As has been described, no individual portion of the Ratzeburg Style was new. In its own day, compared to English Orthodoxy, the Thames Waterman’s Stroke had also represented “a shorter swing on longer slides”4249 with a correspondingly higher stroke rate. Adam’s accelerated recovery, limited back-swing and high ratings were lifted straight from the Moscow Style. Speaking in 1962, Soviet National Coach Evgeni Samsonov stated: “Some people watching us row in 1952 said that we rowed a high stroke, that we copied our technique from the Germans. Actually, no other team rowed then as we did. “Now the Germans – and others – row as we do.”4250 As for Adam’s concern for constant hull speed, in 1866 (!), physiologist Archibald Maclaren wrote, “It having been found that a short stroke, by which the boat is kept at an almost uniform rate of speed throughout, is a vast saving of propelling power, the difference between this and the old stroke resembling that between an unbroken, even, level run, and a succession of leaps and bounds.”4251 Professional sculler and inventor Michael F. Davis, hired by Yale (as a “boatman”) in 1879, wrote that boats “at 44 seemed literally to fly over the surface of the water ‘without settling in the least between strokes . . . Indeed there is no time for settling, for the men slide backward and 4242 Nash, personal conversation, 2004 4243 See Chapter 91. 4244 See Chapter 75. 4245 See Chapter 98. 4246 S. Pocock, p. 197 4247 See Chapter 119. 4248 S. Pocock, p. 247 4249 Mendenhall, Short History, p. 31 4250 Qtd. by Lanouette, Volga, p. 126 4251 Maclaren, pp. 20-2 1166
