THE ERA OF POLARIZATION disclose fully involved lats, shoulders and arms immediately from entry. (Indeed, legs, backs and arms are all immediately, something that is not at all obvious when description.) What is actually delayed with some athletes in some years is significant back motion and arm motion, but even this is relative. Note in the 2004 Houghton sequence that arms were straight and slack only in Photo 1. Photo 2 shows engaged arm and shoulder muscles, and the elbows had already broken slightly. All the others showed shoulder and arm recruitment but delayed elbow break. Winckless’ force curve is a beautiful parabola with a loss of acceleration only toward the end of the pullthrough once the legs have completed their motions and “the arms draw the handle into the body, which is held stable with low and relaxed shoulders.”7635 History has repeatedly shown that a sag in the force curve at the end of the pullthrough is almost inevitable after the legs have gone flat. In addition, such a curve is not uncommon amongst rowers of quads and eights, as the speed of the boat is so high that it is very difficult to keep up with the acceleration during the last few inches. recruited reading Thompson’s Déjà vu Most British rowing of today, at least below Grobler’s National Heavyweight Men, still follow the tenets of Modern Orthodoxy as taught by such coaches as Mike Spracklen, Dan Topolski, Bruce Grainger, John McArthur and Paul Thompson, and yet Britain’s most famous and successful crews of the last two decades, including World Champion lightweight men in the early 1990s, including the World Champion Coxless-Pairs from 1991 through 2002 and the Olympic Champion Coxless- Fours of 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008,7636 and the dominating Women’s Double of 2010, have followed the Classical Technique approach. This should come as no surprise to any student of rowing history. Modern Orthodoxy, with its step-by-step overlapping-sequential approach to the pullthrough, is the spiritual descendant of English Orthodoxy, while Classical Technique, with its emphasis on the organic whole, is the direct descendant of what Steve Fairbairn taught his Cambridge teammates in 1886, long before his name became associated with the excesses of the Jesus Style. Modern Orthodoxy versus Classical Technique, process-oriented versus goal- oriented, is the same argument that has divided British boathouses for a century and more, just as it did when Fairbairn and Muttlebury were rowing in the Boat Race, when Lehmann was coaching at Leander, when Jack Beresford the Elder was coaching at Thames R.C. and when Mike Spracklen was learning to row at Marlow R.C. It’s an English tradition. 7635 Ibid. 7636 See Chapter 136. 2123
