Forever Rowing Upstream
Wall Street Journal
16 July 2009
By Skip Rozin
Boston - Unbeknownst to even the most rabid sports fans, one of
America’s oldest and most storied athletic disciplines is pursued daily
on a nearby river, lake or bay. Thousands of people power racing
shells, narrow boats 26 feet to 60 feet long (depending on the number
of rowers, from one to eight). Some row slowly and methodically; others
push themselves to their physical limit, the long heavy oars hitting
the water up to 45 times a minute, their muscles tortured and their
lungs burning.
It’s understandable if you haven’t noticed: Rowers frequently start at
5:30 a.m., before most of us leave for work. What’s surprising is how
ignorant we are of big-time regattas.
Even for a non-Olympic year, this was a busy season. Last weekend in
Lucerne, Switzerland, U.S. rowers finished fourth among 37 countries
competing at the third of three World Cup regattas. On the last
Saturday of June, 21 titles were awarded at the 138th U.S. Rowing
National Championships on Mercer Lake in New Jersey. Earlier that
month, the University of Washington men took first at the
Intercollegiate Rowing Association National Championships in early
June; Stanford University women won the NCAA championships in May.
Results made few newspapers and rated nary a second of ESPN coverage.
“That’s a problem for us,” conceded Glenn Merry, head of U.S. Rowing,
the sport’s national governing body, in a phone interview. “Right now
we have maybe 150,000 who regularly participate in a sport out of a
population of 300 million. To most Americans, we’re just not relevant.”
This is sad for a sport with a rich heritage. Rowing was the first
American collegiate sport, predating football in 1852 by 17 years.
College teams won gold medals in eight consecutive Olympics from 1920
through 1956 in the men’s eight, the most prominent event.
That early success, hard won by crews from such schools as the Naval
Academy and Yale, earned rowing a wholesome image. But today’s
multibillion-dollar sports machines are driven by stars, money and
violence. A team sport with no professional league, rowing has been
ignored by television—the fan’s conduit to sports. Yet U.S. Rowing
estimates that 85,000 people now row competitively, up from 32,000 in
1986; an additional 65,000 row recreationally. Occasionally races draw
crowds: Boston’s Head of the Charles regatta claims an attendance of
300,000 over its two days each October.
While high schools and colleges form rowing’s core, the new growth is
aided by community rowing clubs. They are everywhere where there’s
water: Boulder, Colo. and Alexandria, Va.; New York City, Chicago,
Oklahoma City and throughout Canada.
One of the busiest is Community Rowing Inc. on Boston’s Charles River,
a nonprofit organization that helps its 1,560 youth and adult
participants row at introductory and competitive levels. CRI began in
1985, when Harvard coach Harry Parker opened his facilities to new
rowers. It offers classes for a fee to anyone and community outreach
free to more than 200 teenage girls from the Boston area—“a third
black, a third white, and a third from all over,” according to CRI.
“Once the sport realized that the perception was the only way to get
into the water was to attend an elite college, people worked really
hard to change that,” said director Bruce Smith from the new CRI
boathouse. “Community rowing exists because a bunch of those elite
people said we’ve got to open the doors of this sport.” Rowing’s image
as a sport for the wealthy and white troubled U.S. Rowing enough to
create a new position, inclusion manager, and hire Richard Butler in
May. His exact duties are as yet undefined, but he might start by
examining the work of CRI.
At 5:30 on a recent Friday morning, dozens of boats propelled by a
diverse group of rowers left the CRI dock: women in the four-oared
shells with coxswain—a nonrowing on-board coach who steers the boat—and
men in their four, each rower with a single oar, all members of the
competitive groups; women just learning in their eight-person shells,
and lots and lots of scullers, singles and doubles and quads—boats with
one, two or four rowers, each with two oars. They glided up river and
down river, under the bridges of Boston, nearly silent except for the
occasional correction of a coach from an accompanying motor launch.
Other Boston boathouses offer learner programs, part of a nationwide
effort to popularize rowing. But increased numbers have not translated
into Olympic success. Rowing is our third-largest Olympic team, behind
track-and-field and swimming, but it produced only three medals in
2008, compared with 31 for swimming and 23 for track and field. The
U.S. Olympic Committee blames an emphasis on big boats, reasoning that
eight rowers could conceivably win medals in three or more smaller
boats.
“They asked what it will take to move the other events forward,”
according to Mr. Merry, making it clear that the USOC uses funding for
leverage. “If we weren’t willing to make more of an effort in the other
events, they would have to put more money into another sport, like
sailing. We’re working on that.”
But U.S. Olympic problems are not limited to a division of effort.
Because rowers traditionally start in high school or college, even the
best don’t reach an elite level until their late 20s. This pushes the
strenuous training of advanced rowing up against studies and career,
causing many to quit. The dropout rate for freshman rowers is as high
as 90%.
Collin Buesser, with high-school experience and a family tradition of
rowing, left Northeastern’s crew after his freshman year in 2008. “We
trained two, three hours every morning starting at 5:45 and then
another two to three hours in the afternoon,” he said. “I just couldn’t
balance all that with nine hours of homework.”
Plenty do manage, however. They put in their hours at college and clubs
dedicated to rowing. One of the oldest is the Riverside Boat Club, just
down the Charles from CRI. Its 210 members pay $550 a year and often
row 11 times a week, training to compete against other clubs and some
of the nation’s best at national championships.
“It’s almost like it’s this closet subculture,” said Riverside trustee
Kate Sullivan one recent morning as early rowers took to the water. “On
the one hand, it’s too bad. Then again, it isn’t.”
For some rowers, anonymity is part of their bond.