Here’s your weekly opportunity to enjoy tales from others who also love rowing. This weekly round-up is for a short list of interesting, in-depth articles for you to read over the weekend.
And of course, if you have news that you think other readers would enjoy – send it to us via our contact page. Each day we tweet and retweet short rowing news links that our followers are sharing – to get these follow @rowperfect on Twitter.
This week in the rowing online news several stories caught our eye:
- The Boat Race furore won’t have escaped notice – but take a read of probably the best race report yet. Written by Chris Dodd for Rowing Voice Magazine “Dead Heat to Cambridge by 4.25 lengths” says it all. But there’s more – Iain Weir is a photographer and has blogged the “Diary of a Boat Race photographer” explaining how he got his great shots and the quiet jostling for position among the papparazzi who follow the race.
- US trials for small boats for Olympic Regatta continued. Standings after the semis were in Rowing Related and the US Rowing final press release announced the crews who will go to Europe to try to qualify for the Olympics. The LW2x is already quailfied but the crew has to come top 4 in the World Cup before being confirmed, otherwise they race again in June [surely destroying their peaking programme for August?] Bizarrely the W2x winners then threw away their crown.
Because both the first and second place finishers declined to race in the [Olympic] qualifying regatta, the opportunity rolled down to Shumway and Trowbridge, who have accepted.
- Ireland has also been running its national team assessment.
- And Iraq’s rowers are also following the Olympic dream as documented in a video on the New York Times website…. Canadian Bruce Smith arrives to coach them but in a later video is turfed off the project.
- A sad letter from a disappointed University athlete who says
My experience with crew was that it is not a welcoming, accessible or particularly health-promoting sport…..in my experience, coaches and crew teams had a narrow mold of rowers and failed to keep in mind the variety of healthy body sizes possible.
