During their first few outings, it is not uncommon for novices of any age to smash their knuckles into their knees. Worse than the bruises, however, is what this does to the run of the boat and the timing of the recovery.

Hands should always lead away from the release, with the back following as the arms extend. When the hands are over the knees, the back should be in an upright position, with the arms partially extended and the knees down. The speed at which the hands move to the knees from the catch sets the speed of the recovery. As a general rule, the hands should move away from the body as quickly as they came in during the drive. When the hands pass just beyond the knees, the knees begin to rise. Their speed sets the speed of the seat as it slides toward the catch. The combined movements of the hands, arms, and knees should blend together so that the blade travels to the catch at a consistent speed and the boat moves smoothly beneath the rower(s). You can practice recovery timing and knee speed on the ergometer. Just remember to always row the way you would on the water.

Keep these points in mind:

* The hands should be behind the knees at the beginning of the recovery.

* The hands should lead the recovery.

* When the back has just begun to come from the layback position, the arms are still moving toward full extension. 

* When the hands are over knees, the back should be over the hips.

* After the hands pass beyond the knees, they should begin to rise.

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Drills are one of the most effective ways to engrain a new habit, particularly those that overemphasize a certain movement so its normal application feels easy. Rowing on the square teaches the correct hand path during the release and balance on the recovery.

There are numerous variations of this seemingly simple drill. Coaches may choose starting the drill in a balanced boat at low speed. Increasing the pressure, speed of the boat, stroke rate, and the number of rowers involved adds to the difficulty of the drill.

Pausing is another popular drill, which helps with balance, sequencing, and crew coordination. This drill also has varying levels of difficulty, with the “easy” starting point consisting of a short pause with fully-stretched legs, the hands in front of the knees, and blades feathered.

The so-called “wide-grip” drill increases the catch angle and, for sweep rowers, emphasizes proper rotation while also stressing balance. Increasing the width of the grip makes this drill more difficult and changing the hand position every stroke adds to the complexity.

The variety of drills becomes literally endless when we start combining them.

In general, beginners or athletes with poor skill levels need to start with more straightforward drills. Experts can be challenged with the most difficult combination of exercises administered with minimal feedback from the coach. 

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A feeling of lightness is one of the hallmarks of good suspension on the drive. When sculling, think about shifting your weight to your feet as you come forward for the catch. Then press your legs against the foot stretchers as your blades drop down to the water and simultaneously engage the lower back, shoulders, and arms. 

 In the early part of the drive, your legs should be driving down while your back remains in a forward body angle, arms extended. At this point in the stroke, it is as though you are standing on your feet and hanging off the oar handles with your arms. This creates a feeling of lightness on the seat and is one of the hallmarks of good suspension on the drive. Always avoid initiating the drive with your back. This reduces the effectiveness of your leg drive and can lead you to dig at the catch.

Here are some other tips:

* As you approach the catch, the weight of your body should shift to your feet as if you were standing up. Maintaining pressure on the foot stretcher sets you up for a solid leg drive.

* Keep your head up and eyes fixed on a point on the horizon as a way to keep your back in the proper position. Tighten the muscles in your lower back to support your legs as you transfer power to the end of the oar.

* When you are properly suspended at the catch, you should feel as though you could lift yourself off the seat. While that’s a sign that you are doing it right, stay in contact with the seat to keep your movements horizontal.

The feeling of hanging on your arms will give you the sense that you are driving the boat forward properly and efficiently.

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One of my greatest worries as a coach was that my rowers would lose their ratio during the throes of battle. The ratio naturally changes as the rates increase, but it’s still important to maintain it, even if the difference between the drive and recovery is reduced at full speed. In a low-rate endurance workout, for example, the ratio between the drive and the recovery may be as much as three to one. At race pace or higher, it may come closer to one to one. But it’s still important to be aware of it. There are several other cues you can focus on. Pay close attention to what proper timing feels like. Try to feel when the backs of your calves touch the ends of the slides, which indicates whether or not you are driving evenly. Keeping the head up on a level plane will help increase awareness of lunging at the catch. By focusing on the horizon you will also be increasingly aware if you are moving horizontally or if there is excessive vertical motion. Paying attention to the oarlocks on your side and on the seat of the rower in front of you are useful tricks to focus on timing. But the most important cue, the one that trumps all others, is whether or not you are in front of your competition during a race. 

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Hanging around New England boathouses, you will eventually come across someone who carries out a beautiful mahogany single. Long and sleek, with a stern that comes to a sharp point, it will draw ooh’s and ah’s from anyone in the vicinity. “It’s a King,” bystanders will  murmur. “Look, Virginia,” an older sculler will say, “That is the Ferrari of boats, a Vermeer. The most amazing craftsmanship you can imagine went into it.”

“Yeah, but it must be heavy. It’s wood,” says the disbelieving youngster. “Otherwise, all boats would be wood, right?”

Actually, no. A well-made wood shell is no heavier than the minimum weight specified by the international rowing federation (FISA) for singles: 14 kilograms (about 30 pounds, 14 ounces). (A King weighs between 12.7 and 15.4 kgs., depending on its owner’s size.) Why, even with eights, a well-designed and well-built wooden eight isn’t necessarily heavier than a synthetic boat. It wasn’t carbon that killed the wooden boats; it was the dearth of skilled craftsmen and the difficulty of obtaining great wood.

And that’s where Graeme King comes into the picture. For the last 40 years, Graeme has been building boats in southern Vermont. People who are lucky enough to own a King count themselves extremely fortunate. “I feel like it’s a tremendous privilege to own one,” says Julia Shivers of Boston, who bought a 25-year-old King flyweight single last spring and had Graeme overhaul it. Her husband, James Cusack, adds, “It’s just the best ride that there is. The sound of the water coming off the hull, the feel of it through the water, it’s perfection.” He got his boat as a birthday present from Julia. A very fortunate couple indeed.

When I visited Graeme in his shop in July, we started by talking about wood. I admired the plywood that goes into the skin of his boats. “I had to start making my own plywood from sapele and mahogany from West Africa because the quality of what you can buy nowadays is a problem. Because I make my own plywood, I can match the grain so that, finished, it looks like one big piece of wood.” The outer skin that catches the light so beautifully is three layers of half-millimeter African mahogany.

I wondered how his path had led him here. He’s an Australian, from Adelaide. In his last year of high school, he saw some guys rowing in singles and tried rowing. On leaving school, he started a metal apprenticeship with the Australian Railways. To his delight, he discovered they had a rowing club, where he saw two brand-new racing singles hanging from the ceiling. “I bet I could build one of those.” And he did. He began making boats for rowing clubs, and, before long, one of the Australian boatbuilders began to chafe at the competition. “He wanted me out of Australia,” King said. Not long after, in 1972, after the Olympics, he received an invitation to become the boatman at Harvard.

Making repairs and rigging and truing twisted oars were all good work, but he knew in his heart that building boats was what he really wanted to do. After returning to Australia for a few years, he set up shop in Vermont. His word-of-mouth reputation ensured that he soon had more than enough customers. In 1983, he was talked into placing an advertisement in American Rowing magazine, and “I was swamped with orders; it was pointless; too many inquiries.” That was his only foray into advertising.

As a trained engineer, he has quite a lot of ideas about boat design. One of his pet peeves is that FISA set minimum boat weights by weighing all the boats at a world championship. One third were average weight, one third were lighter, and one third were heavier. The aim was to keep the cost of the boats down. The lighter the boat, the more expensive it is to build and repair. Instead of using the average weight, officials took the average and subtracted 15 percent for each boat class. The result, King says, is boats that are too light and not durable enough.

“There’s a lot that is still not known about shells,” he says. “It’s not clear what’s actually happening in the boundary layer of water and how the hull-shape variation affects the variation of waves.” King puts a lot of work and thought into his hull shapes (he worked with the head of Bell Labs on his designs), “but the balance between boat weight and hull shape is still not something that can be solved definitively. There’s a lot to test and learn. Boat design is a jigsaw puzzle, and every piece affects other pieces.”

One of his most interesting designs was an eight with a 45-degree fin on port and starboard to provide stability for a more efficient hull shape. It worked well, but the fins were constantly getting smacked against the dock when the boat was lifted in or out of the water. He built 10 of these eights but abandoned them after a few years. The course record at the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association championships is still held by a St. Paul’s School boys’ crew in their wooden King winged eight.

The boats hold their value. Indeed, in the Covid era, there is a hunger for outdoor exercise, and sales of rowing equipment have surged. If you happen to find a used boat for sale, it will not be a bargain. People search for years for lightly-used King singles.

Fifteen years ago, he decided to draw plans for some of his sturdier singles for people who wanted to build their own. There are more people who love the feel of working with wood than I had realized. He has not completed the plans, although some people have made boats anyway with incomplete plans. “I have to flee to Australia for my retirement so that I can have time to complete those plans. I’ve got to get away from so many repairs and requests for new boats.”

It’s common to hear people say that “a King is a work of art.” And it is. But it is also a superb piece of design and engineering. As Graeme says, “To make a simple design, there is a lot of engineering expertise that goes into it.”

Graeme is leaving the States and the business he built this fall to return to his native land. He’s turning the repair business over to two skilled craftsmen, Wade Smith and Jim Lauderdale. His legacy will live on in the elegant simplicity of the 500 boats he has built. To see a King–to sit in it, to row it–is to feel it is alive, that it breathes, that it was built with love. “It’s easy to design a bad boat,” Graeme says, “but it’s hard to come up with a better boat.”

 Graeme King has devoted his life to building those better boats. Come back to the States often, Graeme, even if it’s only to sit on the porch of the Cambridge Boat Club and listen to people admiring those “beautiful wooden boats.”

The post The King of Singles appeared first on Rowing News.

A solid connection between the legs, lower back, and arms is essential to move the boat effectively and sustainably. Because the legs are the strongest muscle group, the arms and back move very little during the first half of the drive, with the arms remaining straight until the legs are down. The leg drive is initiated the moment the blade enters the water. The acceleration of the legs increases the speed of the shell, but the arms and back have to transfer the energy generated to the second half of the stroke. Veteran coach Larry Gluckman (Trinity, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton) suggests that athletes picture a “power rectangle” at this phase of the stroke, formed when the wrists pass over the knees and the rower’s back is in the upright position and the legs are down. Think about these points: 

* Keep your arms straight for the first part of the drive. If you can draw your arms toward your body at the catch, your legs are not fully engaged.

* A strong lower back and glutes will keep your back in the correct position when the knees are down. 

* Strive for a “power rectangle” when you row, with wrists over the knees, arms extended, and the back upright as the legs come down and you press off the foot stretcher. 

* Keep your head up and your eyes fixed on a point on the horizon to keep your back from lifting early.

* The arms and back pry the boat forward once the legs are down. 

The post The Perfectly Connected Stroke appeared first on Rowing News.

How much water can you cover in one stroke?

It’s an important question: small gains in boat run quickly add up. Consider that a single sculler takes around 600 strokes in a typical head race. A five-centimeter increase in distance per stroke would give you about 3.5 boat lengths of extra distance. That’s why it’s good to focus your on-water training this time of year on maximizing boat run.

Training for run includes single-stroke work so you can solidify small changes in your stroke and then gradually build the new movement pattern up to higher rates.

A good drill for this is single-stroke rowing with a pause at quarter slide, holding the pause until the shell almost comes to rest. Start by driving firmly and then release the blade cleanly from the water. Come out of the bow in fluid fashion, without rushing, and feel the momentum you have built up during the drive as you swing forward. Carry the acceleration all the way to the perpendicular point of the handle on the recovery when the knees rise slightly. Pause here and let the boat glide. Once the boat has slowed significantly, carefully complete the recovery and prepare yourself for the catch so the timing is precise and does not interrupt the flow of the boat. In the second half of the recovery, be patient and try to match the hull speed.

Pause for sets of 15 strokes focusing on increasing your meters per stroke.   

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“The single is like an amplifying mirror of whatever imperfection you have,” Ted Van Dusen, owner and operator of Composite Engineering, Inc.—the home of Van Dusen Racing Boats USA—tells me on a Sunday afternoon in February. “To be out in this definitely unstable boat that is very light. It mirrors right back in your face in no uncertain terms—so you learn very quickly.”  

As a former coxswain, I muse on that for a moment. The best feedback on performance I ever got was from my athletes and a tape recorder that captured my race-day calls. The notion of looking directly into some kind of proverbial mirror feels unfairly exposing. Like a never-ending seat race with yourself.  

I’m speaking with Van Dusen and other experts in the realm of sculling to better understand what makes the single so special. Having never rowed one myself, I’m at the mercy of my own assumptions and what others are willing to share. True, there is a sense of freedom and inherent flexibility that comes with rowing a boat of one. But my real mission is to understand what makes this boat class so universally captivating—to find the ways in which it has and continues to evolve our sport.

With no expectation that I’ll get a reply with the Tokyo Games just months away, I send 2016 Olympic silver medalist and one of America’s preeminent single scullers Gevvie Stone an email asking for 10 minutes of her time to talk. To my delight, she gets back to me to say she’s available. Then she replies again minutes later suggesting I call her now. She’s training down in Texas and is currently stuck in traffic driving home from practice, giving her an unexpected few minutes to connect on this day.

Stone picks up my call and I make a point to jump right in, not knowing how much time we will have. I ask her what first drew her to the single, hoping to better understand its allure, particularly given her pre-single background rowing team boats.  

“I confess that I had a little bit of time in the single trying out for the quad in 2008,” she tells me, “but I really didn’t get into the single until I came to Boston for medical school. I had a pretty tight schedule in terms of med school classes, in addition to not having anyone to row a team boat with. The single was the default choice. It gave me the freedom of flexibility with my schedule. I could train when I wanted, which made it incredibly time-efficient. If class got out a half-hour earlier I could practice a half-hour earlier. Just the virtue of being able to do the training plan I wanted at the level I wanted was enough.” 

“The single provides you with immediate feedback on how your rowing translates into boat speed. Part of the magic is that you can layer in teamwork while still learning individual boat feel. You can get everything out of it if you balance it right.”

-Gevvie Stone

Flexibility. Check. But when did she decide it was her boat? “I can’t say I loved it at first. It did give me freedom, which I appreciated, but it also can feel pretty lonely,” she says. “A big part of why I fell in love with it was because I began feeling more comfortable in the boat itself, but I also found a group of people to train with. I started training about a year in with the masters men from Cambridge Boat Club. It gave the single the camaraderie that a team boat has for the hard practices. Since then, I really try to do hard work with other people, because I think just like in a big boat, where working with someone else forces you to elevate your game, working alongside other people forces you to do the same in the single. It provides you with immediate feedback on how your rowing translates into boat speed. Part of the magic is that you can layer in teamwork while still learning individual boat feel. You can get everything out of it if you balance it right.” 

I ask Stone why, when there are boats like the quad or the eight that move so fast, the single reliably commands some of the biggest crowds? “I think the single highlights some of the dichotomy of the sport, in that the better you row it, the easier you make it look: this amazing harmony between effort and beauty.”

She pauses, thoughtfully, then continues. “I think that is what intrigues the outsider. People know in the back of their mind when they watch the Olympics that these athletes are working insanely hard, because it’s an Olympic sport and that’s what people do. At the same time, if you don’t know better, rowing looks easy. Especially in the single because there is an inherent flow to the boat.” As Stone prepares for what would be her third Olympic Games, flow is clearly something she’s got down. 

From sprint racing to head racing, I decide to speak with Mitz Carr next, the defending champion in the women’s grandmaster single at the Head of the Charles. In addition to her athletic pursuits, Carr is also a former coach, current New Haven Rowing Club member, and an active part of what makes Connecticut’s Head of the Housatonic come to life each fall. I’m hoping to build on my conversation with Stone by learning from Carr what has made the single a lifelong passion for her, and how she balances the desire to win with an appreciation for the process. 

I ask Carr about her training and approach to the Charles each year. “I am so demanding of myself in that I want to put out the best performance I’m capable of. It’s not as much about the other people, and it’s not as much about the rowing world, it’s just me personally wanting to hold my feet to the fire on that day. How do I put the pressure on myself throughout the year to make sure that all of my activity starts to ramp up and support what I need to do to get there.” 

When I ask Carr what the single has taught her about both rowing and herself, she inhales for a moment and then recalls one of her biggest challenges. “One of my toughest Head of the Charles memories is being 18 seconds ahead of everyone at Cambridge, only to roll myself out of my boat three strokes before the finish line. That was 2018. I know I’m a little late on the square on the starboard side. That’s not a new thing for me. I rowed port in college. And I knew those oars were a little light and it was gusty, and I caught the gust at the exact wrong time. I was so shot. I remember [coach] Dave Vogel asking me, ‘What on Earth? How could that happen after working that hard, that late in the race, when you had that much of a lead?’ But I was so shot. I had trained the last 100 strokes, and remember thinking, ‘I have to put that out there. I trained for it.’ Then three strokes from the finish, I knifed [the blade] in. I was so spent,” she explains.

I recall the mirror analogy Ted Van Dusen so wonderfully described earlier. “It mirrors right back in your face in no uncertain terms,” he said. This was the “no uncertain terms” part. Knowing now the impact the single had on Carr as an athlete, I ask her about its implications as a coach. “It’s the only proof you’ll ever have,” she says right away. “As a coach, you’ll spend the rest of your life hearing athletes say, ‘I’m better than that. I’m better than where you put me in that seat.’ They’re constantly looking for a proof source to demonstrate how good they are. The one quality we all know about rowers is that they tend to over-value their contributions. ‘If this were a boat of eight of me we’d be flying.’ And it’s constantly the case that, yes, some people can’t put it together on the erg and yet they are great racers. Others have some technical flaws that don’t translate well into certain boats. But when you’re trying to prove that you’re a boat mover, the single is the only proof you will ever need.”  

So how does one master the art of rowing the single, if mastery is even possible? Surely Malcolm Gladwell would concur that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, in this case, would still not be sufficient. “You have to spend a ton of miles at steady state, quietly finding where you find the load and where you best move the boat,” Carr explains. “I don’t know how anyone else would do it. That’s what I did. I spent enough time over my sculling life that I can feel when I have the boat and I know how to accelerate and hold on to it. You have to find a way to be able to identify that moment.” Hearing Carr, it’s clear that a focus on reps is a large part of the answer.

Stone, unsurprisingly, has similar feedback. “You just spend more time in the single. And you make a point not to be too hard on yourself. I think a common mistake, in the beginning, is that people think, ‘My oar caught the water, that’s not supposed to happen,’ or ‘Sometimes I flip.’” I can feel her smiling through the phone. “The best of us do that. I’m not rowing with my oar completely off the water every stroke of every practice. I would love to, but I’m definitely not. I flipped when I was coaching Radcliffe in Florida in the winter of 2017 just shoving from the dock because I left my oarlock undone. I think the more time you spend in the single the more it teaches you. It’s an endless learning curve, and that’s one of the really fun things about the boat, how much it can teach you just by doing it. That’s how you get better. You just put the strokes in.”

With a renewed appreciation for single sculling at the elite and masters level, I consider the ways in which sculling has influenced the junior rowing landscape in recent years. Some of the best junior programs have dedicated sculling coaches and equipment. There are entire youth regattas structured around sculling. It is no longer the case that a middle schooler will be dubbed a starboard at age 12 and remain a starboard throughout college (or beyond). Many of the best youth rowers are learning to scull first and only later to sweep, taking a page from their European counterparts.

I ask Van Dusen what the changing landscape has looked like from a boat-buying perspective. “There’s no question that today that more youth are rowing singles than in the past. The better rowers in the youth program…often their parents will buy them a single when they graduate so they can keep going and row summers when they’re in college.”  

Sean Wolf, who handles all of the Canadian rowing shell manufacturer Fluidesign’s sales across the United States, shares what that trend has looked like for him. A Bostonian through and through, he says “kids start sculling wicked young now. And they are rowing singles really well. Look at Clark Dean, who went from winning youth nationals to winning junior worlds. Even middle school kids are learning how to scull. Take Sarasota and even Saratoga. You see these programs and think, ‘Wow, this is so cool. How does that kid row so well and not feel afraid of anything?’ It blows my mind.”

Maybe Wolf is on to something. Perhaps the key to success in the single is to look into the mirror, but only long enough to appreciate the ways in which it is making you faster. Look often, fail fast, and remain unafraid. That, of course, coupled with those reps. 

The post The Case for Single Sculling appeared first on Rowing News.

I’ve had the great fortune to have known some outstanding oarsmen and oarswomen. As often happens when a group of rowers are together, you get to talking about great races and what made them great. Sometimes the conversation turns to the shell itself. As these athletes are justifiably proud of themselves, it’s rare to hear anyone say, “Yeah, the boat won for us. Anyone could’ve been in there and it would have won.” Nevertheless, credit is often given to one great magical boat.

It was at a session like this that I heard about the Martini Achter, an Empacher that guys a year behind me in college rowed at Henley and in which they won the Ladies Challenge Plate. Accustomed to rowing Schoenbrods in the mid-’70s on the East Coast, they described the Martini Achter as the perfect shell.

 The late Hart Perry, former head of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen (which morphed into USRowing), had arranged for Trinity (my college) to use it at Henley in 1976 because one of his Kent School oarsmen, Charlie Poole, was co-captain and stroke of the crew. When I began to write my column for Rowing News in 1994, Hart told me that I ought to write about the M.A. because it had been the same shell in which the U.S. national team had won the Worlds in 1974 and that the University of Washington had won Henley’s Grand Challenge Cup in 1977. I filed that information away and vowed that someday I would write about mid-’70s rowing, with the focus being the shell itself.

1973–Heidelberg

The year 1973 hadn’t been a good one for the U.S men’s national team eight. Only one oarsman and the coxswain from the silver-medal 1972 Olympic boat had chosen to return. The group that formed the eight for 1973’s European championships in Moscow were not all newcomers to international competition, but blending eight talented rowers into one unit is never a sure thing. The ’73 crew hadn’t worked together well in Moscow.

“We had some really good pieces in practice,” recalls Paul Hoffman, the cox. “We definitely had speed. But on race day we just didn’t race.”

The Moscow course had strong crosswinds, and USA was  in lane six, the worst. The boat didn’t seem to row together; they didn’t seem to be on the same page mentally, and they finished 22 seconds behind the winning East Germans.

 Dietrich Rose, the Vesper coach who had emigrated from Germany to Philadelphia and who helped head coach Al Rosenberg with the eight while Rose coached the straight four in the 1964 Olympics, had accompanied the team to Moscow and worked with the smaller boats. Rose salvaged the disappointing trip by suggesting that an eight and four enter the Heidelberg Regatta the next week.

Some of the eight had school or work commitments and had to fly home right away, but a crew was put together with guys mostly from the eight, a couple from small boats, and an oarsman from the British eight, Hugh Matheson. Moscow had been so un-fun, with such a lousy result, that they felt, “Hey, let’s go to Heidelberg and have at least one good row this summer.” They knew that the regatta was awarding a new Empacher eight to the winning crew, but the real motivation was just to go fast and have a good time.

They raced a Czech eight that had most of the crew that had won silver in Moscow, a couple of West German eights, and a Norwegian boat with the famous Hansen brothers aboard. It was a battle for 2,000 meters, but “this Yankee crew was pissed off about our debacle in Moscow,” says Hugh Stevenson, eventual seven man. “I think we ground our axes all the way. I know I did. There were crews banging away, but we wanted that race.”

The motley USA eight won the race and the shell and a new set of Empacher oars. They hadn’t really focused on the prize, but having won it, and having had a really good race, it was a great way to finish the 1973 season. 

Why Martini Achter? Why Empacher?

It wasn’t unprecedented for a regatta to offer such a handsome prize, but almost everyone is surprised when they hear the story of the Martini Achter. The Italian Vermouth manufacturer, which had sponsored auto racing since 1958, branched out and sponsored some rowing regattas in the early ’70s. The bow of this prize boat featured the Martini name and logo. Empacher boatworks was founded in 1923 in East Prussia by Willy Empacher and his partner, Wilhelm Karlisch, and moved to its present location in Eberbach, 33 kilometers from Heidelberg, in 1945. The partners split up, and for many years Karlisch eights were the boat of choice. (Germany had won the 1968 Olympics in a Karlisch.) Empacher was making a name for itself by being offered as a prize.

1974

The National Rowing Foundation took ownership of the newly won M.A. and moved it to Henley, where it was stored for American crews to use. In late May, Vesper sent a crew over to race in Europe. It was a solid crew with a bunch of national-team veterans. They were the first crew to row the boat and they had unexpected success, finishing second to the West Germans at Mannheim while beating the British, and second to the British at Ratzeburg, and second to the East Germans at Nottingham while beating the Brits. At Henley in the semifinals, they looked over at their opponents and eventual winners, Trud Moscow, and saw that they were in an identical shell, Martini Achter ’72. It was a summer of surprising second-place finishes. They loved the boat.

Back in the United States, coach Al Rosenberg pulled together a selection camp in Connecticut for the eight. Collegiate rowing in the ’70s was dominated by Harvard, and although no one could knock the success of Harry Parker’s crews, Rosenberg had a much different training philosophy.

As Ken Brown, a Cornell oarsman who rowed in the 1973-1976 national eights, puts it, “Although I never rowed for Parker, I did observe his style and heard a lot about him from our Harvard friends. Fiercely competitive, he seemed to focus on results, not process. Seat racing reigned supreme. 

“Rosenberg was an entirely different animal. We focused on technique, science–OK, sometimes pseudoscience–and precision. Fitness came almost naturally as a secondary aspect of precision training. Workouts consisted of innovative skill drills, long rows, and intervals. There was almost no traditional seat racing. Rosenberg selected for a sum of parts that would be greater than the whole, instead of a sum of parts that simply equaled the whole.”

Al Shealy, Harvard stroke and stroke of the national-team 1973-’76 eights, says, “Parker instilled competitiveness at the core as a righteous force that demanded the highest physical and mental output. As such, Harvard’s program attracted and rewarded those who were able to transcend pain to defend the ideals he stressed every day. It wasn’t creativity, but hard work that did the trick.

“Rosenberg, on the other hand, was all about the kinesthetics of the sport, how body movements created speed. He broke us down like wild stallions in a corral. He made it clear from the start that we would soon forget how we were taught to row or be sent packing. For me, I almost didn’t get it and thought I might have to hitchhike out of South Kent. Eventually, we all adapted to his style, which was predicated on the horizontal movement of bodies in the boat. Vertical movement would result in the boat checking, robbing it of speed and efficiency. Quick, but not violent. Quiet, but forceful through the stroke. No wasted motion.”

Rosenberg coached the eight through the 1976 Olympics. His influence on American rowing did not last–just as it had not lasted after his Vesper eight won the gold medal in the 1964 Olympics–but for the summer of 1974, everything worked perfectly. John Everett, three seat in the ’74 eight, says, “Rosenberg was all about efficiency. Many coaches were preaching getting the power on early in the drive with a hard catch, which led to shoulders lifting and all the vertical motion others have mentioned. Al demanded a quick catch, but not a hard catch. He used analogies such as picking up a rolling orange or a rolled-up ball of socks. He also said, ‘It’s like peeling a banana,’ ‘It’s like opening a door,’ or ‘It’s like pulling up your trousers.’”

His passion for drills was famous. Ken Brown, two seat in ’74, recalls two: blind rowing, and body-motionless rowing. “Rowing with your eyes closed was a surreal experience. You don’t realize how much you rely on sight to monitor your timing and blade work, but with your eyes closed, you are forced to feel for rhythm and trust your own body, the bodies in front and back of you, and the movement of the boat in absolute terms. We logged a lot of hours rowing with the bodies fixed in the finish position with arms-only strokes. This was Al’s way of emphasizing the calm, clean and rock-steady way of rowing that he knew moved the boat forward most efficiently.” 

Workouts, even the toughest ones, always centered on technique. Dick Cashin, six man, says, “It was all about getting the hands out, softening the shoulders, picking off the catch and keeping everything horizontal. All his comments were technical.”

 Accustomed to dealing with more mature athletes, Rosenberg separated the wheat from the chaff by seeing who could make technical changes and row his vision of the perfect stroke. It was a more mental process than most guys were used to.

“One of the main reasons Rosenberg’s approach to winning succeeded was the sheer brainpower, concentration and discipline of the people in the boat,” says David Weinberg, coxswain of the ’74 boat. “All of us came to believe that if we rowed the boat better than everyone else, we would win. We could do things in a racing shell that no crew I have ever seen can do. We had complete control over the boat. It was, obviously, the fastest boat I ever coxed but also the best crew I have ever seen.”

Rosenberg, who was the American rep for Donoratico boats, had ordered a new one to be delivered in Lucerne. He had wanted a shell like the East German boats that were known for being shorter than most Western designs. The boatbuilder, however, had taken the length out of the tracks and the Americans could not get their legs down at the finish. Despite numerous attempts to make changes to it, the crew was unhappy and could not get their new Don to move well.

Bill Miller, who had rowed in the ’73 crew and had been in the Vesper boat that was the Martini Achter’s first crew earlier in the summer, was standing with a couple of the disgruntled oarsmen looking at the U.S. boat trailer. He saw the M.A. on the top rack and called it to their attention. “You’ve gotta try it,” he told them. “It’s incredible.” They took it out for a row and, as Al Shealy says, “Never before had I experienced such pure joy of movement and speed.”

It had been designated for the USA lightweights, but a swap was made, and with the lightweights happy in the smaller Donoratico, both crews won the world championships. On the awards dock, Mike Vespoli, who had been on the U.S. team since 1969, turned to John Everett, the youngest in the boat, and said, “I can’t believe it. I finally beat the East Germans!” Everett replied, “I’ve never lost to them.”

1975

Union Boat Club rowed the M.A. at Henley with most of the national team–minus Shealy, Cashin and Weinberg, who had all just graduated from Harvard and had also arrived at Henley with their undefeated crew known as “The Rude and Smooth.” Earlier in the summer, Harvard had raced Union for the right to row a Stämpfli. Union had won that race and now faced Harvard in the semifinals of the Grand Challenge Cup. Harvard was in a Karlisch. It was a fantastic race, with Harvard edging Union and setting a new course record. Unfortunately, the next day, the British national team beat Harvard in the finals. Later that summer at Nottingham, the USA team (with one difference–five man Mark Norelius was away in the Air Force), had a mediocre row, finishing fifth in windy conditions. This wasn’t the Achter’s year; it tasted defeat twice.

1976

With the Olympics in Montreal in July, the decision was made to leave the Martini Achter at Henley. A new Empacher was ordered for the USA; when Herr Empacher announced to his shop workers that a wooden eight had been ordered, cheers went up. The era of wooden boats was coming to an end. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an exact copy of the boat that everyone loved so much. There were some subtle differences; it had a shorter stern deck, for one. Meanwhile, Rosenberg was traveling around the country with his team, moving training camps. Organizational details had never been his strong suit, and the oarsmen were tired and literally sick. They finished ninth.

But the Martini Achter had a great summer. Trinity College was looking forward to using the boat that Hart Perry described as “one of the most beautiful and best boats ever made.” He warned them that it had a deeper hull than the Schoenbrod they’d been using, so they borrowed a deeper-hulled boat from the Coast Guard Academy.

 When the M.A. was delivered to the tents a couple of weeks before racing began on the Thames, the foot stretchers were missing. Perry had told Norm Graf, the Trinity coach, that they would not be in the boat (which didn’t mean they didn’t exist). Graf, misinterpreting what Perry meant, brought over Schoenbrod parts to install new foot stretchers and sneakers.

 “As soon as we turned the boat over and saw there were no tracks or foot stretchers, Norman T. Graf looked like the Millennium Falcon blasting off,” recalls Curtis Jordan, who was along as an assistant coach. “He made a call to Hart explaining that the parts were nowhere to be found and that something had to be done NOW! ‘Yes, I looked everywhere!’ NTG said. I thought ‘Everywhere? You might want to….’”

But NTG was in no mood for suggestions. He got the inside of the boat rebuilt in short order with help from a local boatman. (Graf was Doctor Rowing’s college coach, and he was famous for his short fuse. If his crew had missed only one practice on the water, he would have ripped his friend Perry up one side and down the other.)

When the boys finally got on the water in the Martini Achter, they had a terrible row. On the paddle or light pressure, it flopped around like an ungainly albatross. But as they were finishing practice, they took a couple of 10s at race cadence, and the boat picked up and moved. As Charlie Poole says, “It just flew. The albatross became a soaring eagle.” 

The Trinity guys were aware of the boat’s mystique, and it motivated them. Two man Paul Wendler says, “I felt it had the power to win any race if we could just figure out how to make it go fast. We were told the boat had a hull that required a minimum cruising speed to make the boat rise out of the water. We had to maintain that speed or the boat would be harder to row.”

Other oarsmen in the boat noticed that at speed it made a humming vibration, and once it took off, that sound was a sign they were really moving. Coxswain David Greenspan says, “The feel of the thing was something special. Every cox gets to know how the boat ‘talks’ under the seat and in the feet at catch, drive, finish. This boat seemed to just ‘scream’ once I got used to it. Others had noted how responsive the hull was; it just spoke loudly and clearly to a swain. Perhaps sitting right down on the keel [the M.A. was never built for a coxswain’s comfort] was part of it?”

 Seven man Steve Berghausen says, “What about the sound? My last memory as we rowed and that hull lifted out of the water, there was no sound, no sound of rushing water, no sound of resistance, nothing, only the rhythm of synchronized bodies.”

Trinity set a course record for the Ladies Plate in the semifinals, lowering the old mark by six seconds.

 “I’ve never felt a boat accelerate the way the M.A. could.” says Charlie Poole. “And it just felt like it could go on forever. We were faster in the second half of the course, and the boat felt faster.” On July 4, they celebrated by becoming the only D3 college program ever to win an event at Henley. They all feel that the Martini Achter made the difference.

(In an interesting footnote, Larry Gluckman, who rowed bow in the Heidelberg race that won the M.A., went to Trinity to coach their heavyweight men in 2003. When he stepped into the boathouse for the first time, he saw a Vespoli eight named “Martini Achter.” Harry Graves, four man in the Trinity ’76 boat, had obtained the boat and named it for the best boat he had ever rowed in. After a few years, it was a bit worn, and Gluckman sold it. The program then purchased a new Empacher and named it the Norman T. Graf. That boat, with Gluckman coaching and two of Graves’s sons, Tom and Peter, at bow and stroke, won the Temple Challenge Cup for Trinity in 2005. “Isn’t it strange how things come around?” says Gluckman.)

 After the Sunday finals and victory, Curtis and Norm were left to de-rig the boat as the team went off celebrating. After the riggers were off, they started pulling the Schoenbrod tracks and foot stretchers and grumbling about the process. Curtis did a final check for any items they might be leaving behind. He saw two big wooden boxes stashed at the end of their boat bay sitting all alone. Opening the boxes marked “Martini Achter,” he found eight sets of tracks and eight foot stretchers all neatly packed. There’s a lesson there.

1977

The University of Washington hadn’t had a great spring season but had beaten the University of California, Berkeley.  So, they set off for Henley anyway, convinced they had good athletes who just needed to row more. It was a decision they would not regret. Stan Pocock accompanied the three Washington boats (heavyweight and lightweight eights and a four) as coach Dick Erickson’s assistant. For the trip, he had built a new Cedar Speeder, Pocock’s answer to the new composite boats. It was very light, but cedar isn’t appropriate for 100 percent of a boat, and the boat lacked stiffness.

Mike Hess, captain, stroke and Olympic eight veteran, said they just didn’t feel like they were moving in the Pocock. He had heard plenty about the Martini Achter from his Olympic teammates, the bulk of them members of the ’74 crew. He went to Hart Perry and asked if they could try the M.A. Stan Pocock was insulted and let Hess know it, but the oarsman had a great deal of credibility, having rowed in the Olympic eight the year before. Perry agreed to let them give it a try.

Like Trinity, the Huskies had a devil of a time in it at first. “Being UW, we weren’t pretty and we were all over the place,” Hess recalls. “But when we started to pull, it just got better and better and then one day–magic! It just all clicked. We went up to Nottingham and finished half a length behind the British national team and beat Harvard, the Eastern Sprint champs. Stan began to smile.”

Back at Henley, the crew kept improving and beat Garda Siochana, the Irish national team, by a half-length in a barn burner. In the final, they took revenge on the British national team, beating them by a length. Stan Pocock was very happy as he opined, “It’s fast horses, not fast carriages.”

Seven members of the squad made national teams that summer. They certainly had the horses.

The University of Washington Conibear Shellhouse honored the famous “Boys in the Boat” of 1936 by hanging its eight-oared shell, the Husky Clipper, from the ceiling of the dining hall. In 2017, to honor the 40th anniversary of Washington’s first victory at Henley, a new Empacher was christened “Grand Challenger.” If you’ve paid attention to collegiate rowing in the past few years, you know that the Huskies are right at the top of their game, having won the Intercollegiate Rowing Association team title 12 of the last 13 years.

The boat

So what was it about the Martini Achter? Is there such a thing as a magical boat? Members of all three of those crews certainly thought so and continue to think so today. What made it so fast? A lot of rowers are under the impression that the stiffer the boat–both longitudinally and across the gunwales–the better the boat. The great Stan Pocock, who built boats and had as keen an eye as anyone who has ever coached, said, “Ever seen a stiff fish?”

 The maestro of wooden boatbuilding today, Graeme King, told me that longitudinal stiffness in an eight is overrated.

 “It is far more important in a single, where the weight of the rower is at a single point close to the middle of the boat, whereas in an eight the weight of the crew is distributed over nearly 40 feet, so there is a far better balance between the load distribution and displacement curve, except, of course, if the eight gets hung up on a couple of wave crests spaced about 30 feet apart.”

 If there is a magical boat, why aren’t all boats built like it? The answer may be that the Martini Achter’s fantastic results resulted from a rare combination of the right crew, the right technique, and the right moment.

Bill Miller, the renowned rowing historian who rowed in the M.A. the summer of 1974 with Vesper, said, “I had never believed that a boat made a difference. But the Martini Achter changed my mind. It just never slowed down.”

I asked Graeme why he thought that both Trinity and Washington had so much trouble paddling or rowing at lower cadences. Was there something about the hull shape that would explain this?

 Most likely, it was because these college crews rowed with less skill and precision than a national team, he surmised. But he also thought it could have been the oars. Wooden oars twisted and warped a lot. King remembers hours and hours spent when he was Harvard’s boatman making sure that all eight in a set had the same pitch. The work required taking off the leather and planning down the wood beneath to true them. Trinity had taken delivery at Henley of brand-new Collar oars; Washington brought their Pocock blades with them. The national team had used Karlisch oars. Could that have contributed to the difficulties the college crews faced?

The always quotable Al Shealy, stroke of the 1974 world- championship crew, said, “From the first stroke we took, I thought, ‘This is a magic boat.’ It was like a Ferrari, the greasiest boat I’ve ever been in.

“By ‘greasy,’ I refer to how the boat glided through the water. Going from a Donoratico that was clearly built for the Seven Dwarfs to this stunning piece of craftsmanship was like stepping out of a Volkswagen into a Ferrari. To this day, I can still feel the kinesthetic joy of those first few strokes and I bet my boatmates would say the same. I felt as if we had stumbled upon some magic treasure and in our giddiness wanted to tell the world all about it. And in the end, we did. This joy is undiminished through time and still puts a smile on my face.

“Psychologists use a term for the love of an inanimate object–objectophilia. That is what we feel for this boat. Like a favorite oar, it becomes a part of you. You invest it with human qualities because you want it to know how much you depend on it. You ask of it, you pat its gunwales, and it responds by affirming your intent. Athletes often tear up when they visit a stadium, a court, or a course where they achieved a particular victory. For me, it would be the same if I saw her again. I would pat her again and just say, ‘Thanks, old girl.’”

Destruction and Restoration

After the National Rowing Foundation decided to sell the boat in the late ’70s, Thames Tradesmen, one of the most successful London rowing clubs, bought it, and it was one of their top shells. It had a terrific reputation and great results. It met an unseemly death, however. On a day when the tide was low on the Tideway, as the Thames is called in central London, a coxswain ran over a submerged shopping cart. A 16-foot jagged gash was ripped through the hull. The boat sat on their boat trailer outside the boathouse for several years.

Members of the 1974 crew wanted to buy it and bring it to the States for their 25^th reunion. After three years of negotiation, years in which it deteriorated further because of rocks thrown through the hull, Mike Vespoli and crew bought it and brought it back home. They asked Graeme King to bring it back to life. He did as good a job as they had hoped, putting over 200 hours of loving work into it. In his final invoice to them, he wrote, “The end result is a very stiff and durable boat that, if your crew wishes, can be rowed for another 25 years. In fact, your 50^th reunion was on my mind when I did this work.”

The 1974 crew loaned it to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, where it graced the entryway of the Visitor Reception Center from 2008 to 2014. Sadly, the Seaport decide to raze the building that the Rowing Hall of Fame inhabited, and when that happened, the M.A. lost its home. It sits on the top rack in the Vespoli USA boatworks waiting for a new home. It’s high time that the treasures of our sport find a suitable resting place. We need a permanent Rowing Hall of Fame, and the legendary M.A. deserves a prominent place in it.

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