THE SPORT OF ROWING 161. Athletes Recruiting – Selection – Ergometers In this book I have made an effort to include athletes’ heights and weights whenever possible, and it is obvious that athletes have been getting larger over the decades. Mostly due to higher health and nutrition standards worldwide, general populations have increased rapidly in size during the 19th and 20th Centuries. Times have been getting faster as well, partly owing to better equipment, partly to better training methods, but who amongst us rowers of the past has not thought, “Gee, I couldn’t make the same boat today.” Recruiting Better nutrition does not entirely explain the increase in the size of rowers. A significant contributor to the improvement is recruiting, a 20th Century phenomenon. In professional sports such as football (soccer), the motivation for the system of recruiting athletes is financial – profits for the successful professional teams and coaches, and huge salaries for the best individual athletes. In countries across the world, football is played in the streets by every child, and formal and informal talent-identification systems quickly channel gifted young athletes as young as 6 or 8 to multiple levels of feeder leagues that eventually lead to the pros. In this age of information, the best talents from regions of the world without strong professional leagues are identified across cultural, racial, national, regional and continental boundaries. Professional clubs in Europe now recruit throughout the Third World. There is a similar system based on money for young basketball players in the United States. Athletes as young at 10 compete nationally for amateur clubs, attend national talent identification camps, even receive athletic clothing sponsorships as they progress through middle school, high school and college toward the pros, either overseas or the National Basketball Association. Rowing is different. After the collapse of professional sculling a century ago, there has been little in terms of financial payoff awaiting the athlete or the successful team. However, national governments began stepping in to provide incentives beginning in the 1930s. It was the policy of the National Socialist government in Germany to support national sports teams of the highest quality, including rowing, as a matter of govern- mental policy. Sophisticated systems with generous budgets were developed for organizing sports, educating coaches and administrators, identifying and recruiting athletes and conducting research into techniques, training and equipment. After World War II, the Nazi sports system was adopted, developed and improved by the Soviet Union and its satellites, especially the German 2358
