THE SPORT OF ROWING You can add Đorđe Višacki, 6’6” 198cm 205lb. 93kg, member of Serbia and Montenegro’s 2000 Olympic fifth-place Coxless-Pair,4839 and Jake Wetzel, 6’5” 195cm 207lb. 94kg, Olympic Champion and three times World Champion while representing the U.S. and Canada.4840 Soon absolutely everybody had ringers, but still Steve kept winning. Riley: “Steve Gladstone’s success isn’t just because he can coach a beautiful catch. It’s because he’s really good at actually picking up stuff from everybody else. When you have a very good Serbian or Croatian rowing in your Brown program, you learn from him. You don’t teach him. And that’s what Steve did.”4841 During his second tenure at the University of California (1997-2008), his 1999 and 2000 IRA wins were attributed to PAC 10 athletic conference rules allowing freshmen to row on varsity teams. The IRA closed that loophole, but Steve’s Cal crew still won the 2001, 2002 and 2006 IRAs. Steve received a fine education at Kent School and Syracuse University, but I know of no major current American coach since Jim Rathschmidt who is not also a college graduate. Steve was coached by Tote Walker at Kent and Loren Schoel at Syracuse, and he coached at Harvard alongside Harry Parker, but the American coaching ranks have always been full of protégés of such legendary coaches as Charles Courtney, Jim and Ned Ten Eyck, Hiram Conibear and his many followers, of Richard Glendon, Joe Burk and Allen Rosenberg. 2002 Bronze Coxed-Fours, 2003 Bronze Eights, and also a member of 2002 Croatian 4-Man Bobsled Team. 4838 Becker, op. cit. 4839 See Chapter 137. 4840 See Chapters 151 and 159. 4841 Riley, op. cit. Steve Gladstone is a coach who has had decades to learn and grow, but there certainly are a number of other experienced coaches in America. Steve Gladstone has been deeply respected by his teams, but there certainly are plenty of other charismatic coaches respected by their teams. Steve’s crews have been manned by fine athletes, but his competitors also have had fine athletes. Despite all this, few have ever looked to rowing technique or force application for even a partial explanation for the inordinate success of Steve Gladstone. Accordingly, there is no large cohort of successful major coaches following a Gladstone technique template. He remains largely a riddle to his contemporaries. Rowing News: “While some coaches have scoffed in the past at Gladstone’s willingness to extend beyond traditional approaches to coaching and recruiting, it is that very vision that sets him apart as a perennial winner.”4842 In fact, it is actually Steve Gladstone’s willingness to return to the traditional approaches to technique abandoned a half- century ago by most Americans that truly sets him apart from late-20th Century American coaches. This continues to make Steve unique today. Steve’s role models are men like Ky Ebright. He still reads and learns from Steve Fairbairn. Gladstone is an historian of rowing, a man with perspective, a true traditionalist whose vision goes forward while he looks back a century and more. How much his Classical Technique has contributed to his perennial winning is for the readers to decide. 4842 Becker, op. cit., p. 48 1348
