Harold Ambler: What makes rowing unique
01:00 AM EST on Monday, January 21, 2008
HAROLD AMBLER
AUSTIN
I HAVE HAD CAUSE to ask myself why anyone other than rowers and former rowers should find the sport interesting. What follows is a list of things that separate rowing, the oldest intercollegiate sport in the United States, from every other sport.
Here are the top 20 reasons that crew is unique
• Seldom can you determine which member of a crew won a race; but it is frequently possible to tell which member of a crew lost a race, when that person took a bad stroke, dislodged his or her sliding seat from its tracks, or ran catastrophically out of energy at the end of a race.
• Rowing is the only sport whose participants travel backward.
• It is the only sport whose participants’ survival depends upon the intelligence and focus of a teammate, the coxswain.
• Rowers like to say that they are in the greatest cardiovascular shape of all college athletes, and it is a reasonable claim. Cross-country skiers and runners are their principal rivals for the honor.
• Rowing is the only sport in which novices have become Olympians in as little as two to three years, and that is not because it is easier than other sports or because there is less competition for spots. The competition for spots on the Olympic team is fierce.
• While runners and other endurance athletes also push themselves, they do so with the knowledge that they can quit at any time, even in the middle of a workout. Rowers cannot stop rowing in the middle of a practice or race, or else an oar handle will jab their spine, their ribs, or one of their kidneys. The pain of this is probably discouragement enough from the very reasonable idea of quitting in the middle of a piece, but the social component is stronger. To stop rowing, when one’s teammates are exerting themselves no less than oneself, is truly beyond the pale.
• Rowing is unique in that the athletes are not allowed to speak while participating (even if they had the wind to do so). This means, among other things, that a lot of strong feelings are running just beneath the surface of the average crew, which is palpable as soon as one approaches a working college boathouse.
• Water polo looks taxing, and it is. Football looks dangerous and exhilarating, and it is both of those things. Rowing looks poetic, relaxing even, but the sport is internally violent. The level of exertion required is so immense that death seems a real possibility on a regular basis, which is among the reasons that rowers are notoriously insular — they are in the process of having near-death experiences, psychologically, every day. For a group of rowers to depart from the subject of rowing in a conversation is not necessarily easy in such a context.
• There is no analog for seat-racing in any other sport. There is no intra-squad competition that is as intense, as personal, and as visible.
• No other coaches ply their trade at the helm of a boat; no other coaches burn gasoline to keep up with their athletes; no other coaches have to perform as much plane geometry and calculus in their heads to keep themselves and their athletes safe.
• No other sport involves a public-address system with speakers beneath the athletes’ bodies.
• No other sport involves tying oneself into shoes that other athletes have worn.
• No other sport involves tying oneself into shoes that are fixed to a craft that can sink.
• No other college sport has to concern itself with icebergs. (Both my father and I were in boats that struck icebergs at Dartmouth; Dad’s boat sank as they rowed it to shore. He and his boatmates had to run in socks, across the snow, three miles back to the boathouse. The boat I was in was an expensive Vespoli that the varsity had taken out for its maiden row at dusk; we started a power twenty and the next thing I knew I was sitting about two feet higher than before in the bow seat, looking down at a car-sized iceberg on either side of me.)
• No other college sport makes such extensive use of machines, principally Concept2 ergometers, or requires that athletes spend so much time physically attached to them.
• No other college sport involves the betting of an item of clothing to be delivered to or received from one’s opponent as soon as the contest has ended.
• No other sport uses a single piece of equipment that is nearly 60 feet long.
• Few other sports suffer an occasional drowning.
• No other sport requires such complex traffic control: At the end of practices, shells line up waiting to come into the dock like passenger jets waiting to land at a major airport.
• No other sport’s athletes carry the dead weight of a teammate, i.e., the coxswain, on the playing field; no other sport’s athletes are spoken to throughout their races by that same player-coach; no other sport’s athletes “reward” their victorious player-coach by hurling the individual into water that is frequently both frigid and polluted.
Harold Ambler is an Austin-based writer, editor and musician. He rows recreationally on Austin’s Town Lake and is the editor of the forthcoming Ever True: The History of Brown Crew