INTERNATIONAL ROWING TURNS PROFESSIONAL evolutionary path followed by much of the rest of the Soviet squad. In 1962, he described his training schedule as three or four intense sprint sessions during the week and distance work on the weekends. Bud Palmer, NBC Sports during the 1964 Olympics: “Ivanov started training for these Olympics over a year ago. Every third day he sculls 25 miles, and he runs 5 miles every single day.”3769 Ivanov: “Every Saturday afternoon, I row out from Moscow to my dacha. It is about seventy kilometers [forty-plus miles] from the city. At first I used to rest, but now I don’t. It is very beautiful country. The trees and fields go by, and I forget about time and distance. I sleep at my dacha until 5 Sunday morning, and row back to Moscow by noon.”3770 Forty years after he retired, Vyacheslav Ivanov remains a role model for two of the world’s most thoughtful and metaphysical present-day coaches, Mike Spracklen3771 and Jimmy Joy. Spracklen responds to the common inspiration he shares with Ivanov, namely that of Fairbairnism in its original pre-Jesus Style iteration. Spracklen’s Canadian men’s eights beginning in 2003 have echoed the back swing of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Joy: “Ned Hanlan, with the inception of the sliding seat, quickly mastered the coordinated movement to his advantage with his lively, consistent trunk swing. Seventy years later, Ivanov would achieve the same mastery.”3772 “In seeing Ivanov on film for the first time in 1985, I thought that Ivanov was the 3769 Palmer, NBC United States telecast of the 1964 Olympic singles heats. 3770 Qtd. by Lanouette, Volga, pp. 127-8 3771 See Chapter 130. 3772 Joy, Hanlan, p. 7 epitome of flow in the transition phases at both ends of the slide bed. “He obviously had a great sense of pace, efficiency and used his energy resources very effectively over 2 km.”3773 Thor Nilsen includes a training film of Ivanov in his PowerPoint presentation, Orthodox to IMS. What seems so impressive to many coaches today is the highly effective body swing that Ivanov employed to send the boat. Indeed, the 60° of body swing shown in Nilsen’s training film and the 1960 footage pales in comparison to the 75° swing Ivanov employed while racing into a headwind in Tokyo in 1964. The Tokyo film on the previous page is especially evocative of the effectiveness of Ivanov’s boat-moving technique. Frames 6 through 10 capture well his total body commitment from fingers to toes. Interestingly, in contrast to race footage from 1960 and 1964, his training films, one of which is also included in this chapter, lack the dynamism of his send at the release, the quality that seemed to fuel his amazing sprints. After his two international victories as a youth in 1956, the following year Ivanov was beaten at the Diamond Sculls by Stuart Mackenzie. As already mentioned, Mackenzie also won the 1957 Europeans with Ivanov third, and the two repeated those placings in 1958. But the next five years were Ivanov’s most successful. In 1959, Ivanov won his second European Singles title and in 1960, Mackenzie having purportedly been sidelined with an ulcer, Ivanov won his second Olympic Gold Medal in Rome over Germany’s Achim Hill.3774 Then another Gold in the 1961 Europeans, Gold in the first World Rowing 3773 Joy, personal correspondence, 2005 3774 Dodd, Henley, p. 163 1035
