Rowing Illustrated

If you are harvard, what are you doing now? I don't think they can complain about talent with multiple U23 gold medalists. At what point do the athletic department/alums force change at the top? Last year and this year aren't a great look, but pre-COVID things were about average by historical stand...

The thing that's obvious if you've been in the race is that the umpire is far from infallible and there are always moments where you feel like you're getting the short end of the stick/getting warned when you feel like you're in the right place or trying to get to the right place. So handling that i...

The men's race is always run at the fastest point of the incoming tide. Additionally, the water is extremely shallow near Craven Cottage so the typical racing line goes pretty wide. My guess is that the Cambridge coaching staff correctly identified that the extremely rough water negated the benefits...

rowing wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 6:59 pm "the US M8+ has won two bronzes, one silver, one gold."

Should it be noted that Teti rowed or coached 75% of those?

Except the last of those was 15+ years ago, and he had a generational athlete at stroke to help him do it. The sport has changed a lot in that time but Mike hasn't.

The stuff about Bill thumbing his nose at others is total nonsense. Bill thumbed his nose at exactly one guy (the extremely prickly Harvard AD at the time) when he didn't get Harry's job (and then Charley's job). He did so with some justification. That guy then did everything in his power to prevent...

All the stuff about Charley misses the point. The real story of the past 10 years is Yale/Gladstone. If you look at Harvard's average performance in IRA GFs before/after Gladstone started winning things with Yale, I bet it's about 1 place lower. Should they be doing better with what they have, maybe...

I am not sure I understand this perspective of "the rules only matter if the race is close." So Yale should get DQ'd for missing a buoy when they win by 1 second but not when they win by 10? If Yale show up with a motor next time and only turn it on once they're already ahead, that's cool ...

The focus on the trials system is misplaced. On the men's side at least, all the best guy were already at the TC.

I'm not sure why people give the US men a pass. Sure, the 8+ was closer than in '16, but (1) there was a nice tail this time to tighten up margins; and (2) the 4- was the priority boat in Rio (lol yeah that worked well...); and (3) the 2- didn't even qualify this time around. I actually think the US...

If you want a different coach, advocate for a different coach but I would put up with any amount of verbal or emotional abuse if I felt I had a better chance at gold. Spracklan, Teti, Tonks, Terhaar - all wildly successful coaches who have multiple stories of these kinds of things so maybe demandin...

There are people that Mike likes, and people that Mike doesn't. If Mike likes you, things are good. If Mike doesn't like you, he can be downright abusive. The fact is, our athletes' lives are precarious. They are incredibly underpaid, they live a stressful existence where their "job" is on...

While Robbie has underperformed, I'm not sure you can suggest selection based on nebulous qualities like "experience". If it's not enough to prove you're faster on the water at the time of selection then I'm not sure what more an athlete is supposed to do to earn their seat. Perhaps select...

I do enjoy the rubbishing of Oxford's technique that happens every year. The fact of the matter is that the only actually important thing in an eight is getting connected close to the front end and Oxford do that pretty well. Cambridge may look pretty (or more likely people just buy into the hype th...

If you're winning, you don't want to clash. It is incredibly disruptive to have your stern pair clashing and you usually come off worse for it. I strongly question some of the decision-making of the Cambridge cox.

do you really think the Serb's and Czech's are paying tuition at Harvard/Yale/etc? That is straight up laughable. Not only do they have full rides, they will usually get easy jobs to give them extra cash for walking around money. you can dream all you want, but Stanford isn't leveling up Craig. Tha...