THE SPORT OF ROWING many coaching influences, wind conditions, stroke rate. “I have never used degrees and instead told all crews I have coached to row as far back as they can to a position just before they slump. Each athlete and crew has been able to do this to different degrees based on their age and physical abilities. I actually tell crews to sit up in a tail- and lay back more in a headwind, too, so, even this changes things for the outside observer.”7997 Truthfully, the issue of layback in Canadian rowing has always been a red herring. The real gap between Mike’s men and the recent Canadian norm has always been in force application, not layback. Led by Brian Richardson’s and Volker Nolte’s and Mike Spracklen’s own teachings and writings,7998 much of the country had switched over to post-Rosenberg Modern Orthodox Kernschlag. The trouble has been that despite Mike’s words, Mike’s Canadian crews have always rowed Schubschlag, just as they did during Mike’s first tenure in Canada between 1990 and 1992. Intolerance Remember the consistent criticism of the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Champion Polish Lightweight Double by commentator Daniel Topolski on FISA Olympic and World Championship videos?7999 In the Era of Polarization, Modern Orthodox adherents, like their English Orthodox predecessors a century earlier, reacted to perceived heresy with strong condemnation, and that is exactly what happened to Mike Spracklen in Canada. Intolerance is an integral part of all orthodoxies in human culture, not just in sport and certainly not just in rowing.8000 Mike’s success has been perceived as an assault on well-understood federation policy, official or unofficial, an assault on the Canadian status quo, and so it has been politely rejected or explained away. Spracklen: “The opinions of coaches that differ from my own do not offend me, and it is beyond my comprehension why my version of technique offends those who differ.”8001 But the irony is that precisely what seems to offend Canadians about Mike’s crews is the elegant arc of their back swing all the way to their long finish, and yet that is so much an echo of the technique of the Golden Age of Canadian rowing, of Spracklen’s Olympic Champion Men’s Eight of 1992, of Silken Laumann at her best in the early ‘90s, of Derek Porter when he won his 1993 World Singles Championship, of Marnie McBean and Kathleen Heddle and all their Al Morrow- coached Olympic Champion teammates of 1992 and 1996, the crews that Canada left behind in its rush to adopt less layback along with Modern Orthodoxy. Morrow: “I believe that technique is just a part and maybe even just a minor part of performance. There are many components that lead to success, and I have seen crews row all different ways technically and not even necessarily that well together, but other factors like motivation and belief, training hard, great training plans, good rig and great genetics have been the main reasons for their success. “Technique has been important for Canadian teams, but I think the whole support structure behind us, which has 7997 Morrow, personal correspondence, 2010 7998 See Chapter 130. 7999 See Chapter 146. 8000 See Chapter 18. 8001 Spracklen, op. cit. 2226