A small handful of the people who read this post will decide that they hate me, for I advocate a renovation of the sport of rowing that has become a tradition in their families. When the working class kids show that good rowing technique and world record times have nothing to do with good breeding and wealth, then the sport will have to change. I’m not going to be some heartless rowing socialist who screams at these rich kids that “life sucks sometimes, and this is what you get when spend more time partying than in the gym and on the erg, and in the water and studying for your classes.”
But that is the reality for a good number of students from what I call the “Rowing Class” which tends to mostly include people who may have had their water and gas shut off because they didn’t have the emotional fortitude to pay the bill, but they have not had their water shut off because they could not only not find enough money to pay the bill, but they couldn’t find enough time from their obligations to apply for public assistance. (The gas was shut off a long time ago.) The reality of rowing is that the best erg monkey in the world needs to get in the water at least a bit of the time. Yeah, slides are great under the erg, but they don’t change the power-transfer, as much as just make your Concept II look friggen awesome as smoked ceviche. Heck, I don’t even have a slide and I’m the future champion of the Monte Carlo U-250 Invitational in the men’s senior heavyweight division. If you can’t get your shit bird ass inside a shell, on the water, then you will never have an idea of how to properly couple into the water. An erg has a largely linear relationship to viscosity and speed, and on-the-water boat has a HIGHLY nonlinear relationship to viscosity and speed. So a good rower will adjust her or his attack angle from their paddle position constantly through his or her run, because when the boat first starts to move, the turbulence is largely from the blade tips rather than the hull. But as the boat comes up to speed, the turbulence transitions to a system that interacts between the blades and the hull. A single-place rower will then have to adjust his or her attack slightly as he or she transitions to a boat with more rowers, because the turbulence becomes a large-body problem, and a good rower can take advantage of a lot of nonlinearities in her or his power transition strategy.
And that’s the reason why so many people who read this are going to get pissed at me. They can’t ignore the basic physics of moving a displacement hull through a linear wave system. This is established in the rowing community. But when they try to ignore the less-basic physics of moving a transitional hull through a non-linear wave system, their heads explode a year later when they see that the teams who respected the strategic advantages of coupling into the non-linear wave system won a lot of events. They look at their fabled family legacy come to slow and sad end, as even the $160,000 high performance shells they donated to XYZ University can no longer reliably deliver the cups, or the pickle dishes.
And the reality of this is that a cup-winning crew is a cup-winning crew because they have just enough coaching not to fuck up their rows, and they have some good minds on the boat. This is not some kind of “coxswain rocket surgery.” This is stuff that every rower in the crew and in the team need to learn.
And yet, none of this really matters all that much when you’re cutting air on the Pain Sled.
When you’re on the erg, your power-transition is much more simple, and not just because you’re yanking on a symmetric solid bar rather than an asymmetric oar or two. It’s much more simple because air has something that water does not … it’s easily compressible. And because it’s easily compressible, the vaguaries of your power-transition tend to manifest themselves as noise, or maybe a little harmonic buzz from the erg, perhaps a little heat in both the erg mechanisms themselves and the air around the fan. But what those nonlinearities do not do, is turn themselves in tiny pneumatic hammers that work against the forward movement of a displacement hull in water.
What does this mean for competitive rowing? There are potentially world-class rowers who have never been in a boat, and because they have neither been in a boat nor have any immediate plans to be in a boat, they will remain on the cataclysmic fringes of rowing. It’s hard to find flatwater, it’s expensive to buy rowing shells, it’s tough to build the pace boat and support boat programs, and it’s damned near impossible to build a crew house that doesn’t become the center of a gaping hole straight to Gary, Claude and Satan himself. Rowers are … erm, an unusual kind of athlete. Global Rowing has found rowing prodigies in poverty and brought them up through the universities and club programs. But Global Rowing has failed to do what Optimists International did for sailing. Unlike the Optimists, they have failed to create a simple, open-source build plan for simple One Design rowing shells. If you throw a bag of weed into a crowded party at the Yacht Club, half of the demented souls in that place would admit to growing up sailing Optis on some hell-forsaken polluted lake in some industrial wasteland somewhere. The Optimists turned a bunch of dirty kids into millionaires by giving them a class conduit to the Societal Pleasures of Sailing. Yeah, sailing Optis was fun, but how many people now see them as anything other than a kid’s boat, rapidly replaced by the Bic O’Pen. Who? A handful of hardcore sailors who don’t gave a rat’s ass about a conduit to a bunch of wealthy people who need to hire them to beat up their bowman for langauge unbecoming of a stevedore. They sail the shit out of those Optis, in shit weather, in bailing conditions. But they do it not because the Optis are good sailboats, but because the Optis are the smallest possible boat on which a sailor can experiment with tactics and get a near immediate feedback from the wind and the water to guage to the soundness of the strategy.
And that’s the legacy of the Optimists in this one. They saved the sport of sailing from Death by Luxury. Global Rowing has not done that, it has created a two-pronged monster, with the gifted athletes on ergs, the gifted and lucky athletes in shells, and the neither gifted nor lucky but rather wealthy athletes, in single skiffs.
I have found a small company that manufactures folding rowing shells. I have obtained a sample and with some key modifications, I believe that they can present an inexpensive way for erg rowers to acquire a very inexpensive entry to in-water rowing. With this product, I believe that Global Rowing can acquire gifted athletes from other more lucrative sports, and expand our reach into every economic class and subclass in the world, including West Africa and Haiti. I have decided to follow the lead of Optimists International, and purchase all of this technology, in order to Open Source is Opti-style, to allow the lowest possible cost, time and expertise barrier of entry for new rowers.