Lessons From the Paris Olympics

One could get philosophical when thinking about the constant cycle of training and racing. Compared to ball sports like baseball, where athletes often compete several times a week for months at a time, leaving little time for training, we rowers are known for putting a lot of time into preparing for our short races.

On the other hand, baseball athletes get a lot of feedback from their games—their strengths and weaknesses, what parts of their game worked and didn’t. They also get a lot of information about their opponents.

In comparison, we rowers get very little race information about ourselves and the competition. It’s very rare for teams to compete frequently against each other either on the national or international level. In fact, very few countries participate regularly in world championships, and in a given year, it’s unusual for countries outside of Europe to race in more than one international regatta outside of the world championships and the Olympics.

Club and college teams fare a little better, since they have the opportunity to meet certain opponents a few times during a season. If they’re preparing for a national championship, however, they may have the chance to meet competitors from their own region but rarely teams from the other side of the country.

In addition, every racecourse is different, and it’s often very difficult, if not impossible, to get detailed information from other crews. Usually, we have no information about the wind, water temperature, and current—all factors that can affect rowers during different parts of a race. In sum, there are many unknowns that can influence race strategy.

By analyzing training data, we can gather valuable information about ourselves outside of racing. We can run test pieces and time trials with and without other boats, measure times, stroke frequencies, even force and power, as well as technical measures such as “slip” and “wash” or the timing of individual crew members performing certain parts of the stroke. But it’s impossible to simulate fully a competitive 2,000-meter race.

So what can we learn from racing?

Something about ourselves.

Well-planned tests tell us how our training is going. Are we improving our strength, endurance, and technical and tactical skills? What specific measures are we confident we can achieve, such as a certain stroke rate or target speed? What weaknesses do we need to work on? Are our target stroke rates sustainable, and how does our speed compare to that of our opponents?

The most valuable learning is achieved by recognizing factors that have not gone well. Is the stroke rate too low or too high to achieve the best speed? Can we make some changes to the rigging to help us execute our race plan better?

It’s helpful also to study the top rowers in their most important competitions. With the Paris Olympics just over, let’s look at the performances of the best in our sport.

At first glance, the high stroke rates are striking. In his latest analysis, Valery Kleshnev calculated that the average stroke rate of all the finalists over the full 2,000-meter distance was 40.2 strokes per minute, and it was even higher over the first 250 meters. All teams explode out of the starting blocks with the highest possible intensity, and you have to be very skillful to achieve and maintain such demanding exertion.

Here are a few lessons from the Olympic finals:

* If you want to win a race at the highest level, you have to be in the lead at 500 meters or at least very close to the leading boat. The gold-medal winner was in the lead at the 500-meter mark in nine of the 14 finals. Of all the boats that were not in the lead at 500 meters but ended up winning the gold medal, the Croatian men’s pair was farthest from the lead at that point— but only by 2.54 seconds. All the other following teams that won eventually were less than half a length behind the leaders at 500 meters.

The lesson: If you’re not leading early in the race and want to win, you must stay close to the leaders the whole time. If you’re too far back, you won’t be victorious (see the men’s single below).

The few boats that sprinted into a much better position in the last 500 meters demonstrated unbounded effort. To do so, you must have a very special mindset, be physically and especially mentally strong, and able to overwrite the feedback from the accumulation of lactic acid.

* If you want to achieve the best result you can, it’s important to have a realistic idea of what place to aim for. If you’re too conservative in the beginning, the race will slip away. If you’re too results-oriented or think you can outdo better teams, chances are good you’ll be disappointed and will have to settle for a poor result.

* Of the 84 crews in the finals, only two sprinted to a medal from a fifth or even sixth place. The famous Sinkovic brothers worked their way from fifth place at 500 meters and fourth at 1,500 meters to their third consecutive gold medal. But they had several things working in their favor. They could draw on a wealth of experience. They never trailed the leaders by more than 2.54 seconds (which means they were always in contact with the leading crew). They rowed in what was probably the least-contested race and won with the lowest percentage of world-best times of all 14 races. And finally, they surged ahead when their strongest competitors took a very bad stroke only meters from the finish line.

* The second boat that worked its way to a silver medal all the way from sixth place at 500 meters from the finish line was the single sculler Yauheni Zalaty, who competed as an individual neutral athlete, having raced for Belarus at U19 and U23 Worlds. At 1,500 meters, he was 5.7 seconds behind the second boat and yet managed, in the race of his life, to cover the last 500 meters in 1:36.60—a feat he’d never achieved before.

This was the second-fastest fourth 500 meters ever rowed in an Olympic final, only a few hundredths of a second slower than Xeno Müller when he won the gold medal in 1996. In this part of the race, the individual neutral athlete was 2.4 seconds faster than Oliver Zeidler, the dominant gold-medal winner of the race, and more than six seconds faster than any of the other scullers. He benefited from the exhaustion of three scullers (from The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Greece), who seemed to go out too fast and had their slowest 500 meters in the last stage of their races.

All the successful rowers, including the aforementioned single sculler who raced as an “individual neutral athlete” (instead of for banned Belarus), showed the typical U-shaped race profile, with a fast first and fourth 500 meters and a more or less constant and slower speed in the middle 1,000 meters.

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