THE SPORT OF ROWING “Every coach has an image of what they think the perfect stroke is, and if they don’t, how are they proceeding? You have to be moving toward something, but each one of those years, I let them row the way the stroke-man rowed. “They were good, and not that I didn’t have to make some changes, but there was a basic feeling that they had about how to row the boat, about how to row with the speed of the boat.”8489 Biomechanist Valery Kleshnev: “Everything that looks easy is efficient. Everything that looks heavy and very powerful is not efficient. The same everywhere. Good runners don’t look heavy and powerful. They look light and easy. That’s my point.”8490 Transition to the Pullthrough: To Backsplash or Not “Swing” is inextricably linked, to “easy speed,” to success in rowing, and 1980s Penn A.C. World Medalist rower Dan Lyons has a theory as to what it actually is: “I think the most important element of boat moving is the coordination of catch timing to the flow of the boat.”8491 Bourne: “The mystery of the beginning [is] that it must be caught in an instant and caught firmly, yet without hurry and without undue effort.”8492 1964 Vesper Olympic Champion Coach Allen Rosenberg: “Swing results from an efficient recovery; it is a harmony of movement, a delicate balance between movement of the oarsman’s body in the boat and the boat’s intrinsic forward motion.”8493 Indeed, the most delicate and important moment in the entire stroke cycle must be 8489 Congram, personal conversation, 2004 8490 Kleshnev, personal conversation, 2011 8491 Lyons, personal correspondence, 2006 8492 Bourne, Textbook, p. 7 8493 Ferris, p. 8 the transition from recovery to pullthrough. It is at this moment that the boat can either “check” or “swing.” It is here where Fairbairn’s “endless chain”8494 is most easily broken. Congram: “The most important question is how do you change the direction of the body weight and how do you put the blade in the water? That’s the moment when you have the most chance of either hurting the boat or helping the boat by not interrupting its flow.”8495 Paul Thompson: “The change of direction in the catch position is where there is greatest risk of upsetting the run of the boat and negatively affecting its speed.”8496 At the end of the recovery, during the oar’s transition from moving toward the bow to beginning its motion back toward the stern, there is a theoretical instant when the blade is at rest in its arc. At that moment, the boat is traveling through the water at a certain speed, and so from the rower’s perspective looking out, the water appears to be moving quickly underneath the motionless blade. The crucial technical dilemma is how to bring about the mating of the water and that blade. The seeming either/or choice is to interface at the speed of the water, causing no splash forward or backwards, or interface at the speed of the boat, causing “backsplash.” The actual choice forms a continuum between backsplashing at one extreme and frontsplashing at the other. Rowing the blade in, the no-splash, or more realistically, evensplash alternative, represents the theoretical middle ground. Crews have been consciously and unconsciously choosing from this full range of options since the early 19th Century, and 8494 See Chapter 19. 8495 Congram, op. cit. 8496 Thompson, p. 37 2386
