Requiem for Lightweight Rowing

Like many of you reading this, I have spent many hours watching the Olympic rowing in Paris. So much great stuff! How on Earth do the Romanians row so high? How have some boats been able to improve upon their results from last year’s world championships or this year’s World Cup racing?

As exhilarating as the racing has been—what about the USA men’s four, the men’s pairs, the British men’s eight, the Dutch women’s pair, and Oli Zeidler’s taking control of the singles field right from the first stroke?—I also feel sadness creeping in when I watch the magnificent racing of the lightweight doubles.

We are watching lightweights for the last time in the Olympics. In a move to cut down on the number of rowing athletes in the Games, and to make room for new, flashier, more TV-friendly events, the two lightweight events that have been a part of the Olympics since 1996 will be dropped from future Olympics.

I spent 11 years coaching lightweight women on the national and international level. In 1974, FISA, the precursor to World Rowing, introduced lightweight events for men at the championship level. They were called the FISA Lightweight Championships. The medals were smaller (“because you are smaller” was the joke), and they weren’t called world champions officially like their bigger brethren. Through much of the ’80s and ’90s, there was a big push to include also lightweight events for women, first at the world championships, then at the Olympics. In 1985, lightweight events for women were added to the world-championship program.

In international racing, both world-championship and Olympic rowing, the maximum weight for each male competitor is 72.5 kilograms (159.8 pounds), and the average weight of the rowers cannot exceed 70 kilograms (154.3 pounds). For the female rowers, the maximum individual weight is 59 kilograms (130 pounds), and the average weight cannot be more than 57 kilograms (125.6 pounds).

Perhaps Beach Sprint rowing, the event that will supplant the lightweight doubles at the LA Olympics in 2028, will be exciting. It certainly seems to have been created with an eye to television. Competitors will sprint 50 meters on the beach toward the water, jump into their boats, row out into the ocean to a buoy 250 meters off shore, spin and then sprint 50 meters again to the finish line on land. It sounds like something created for television, like some of those reality shows like The Superstars.

I suppose “real rowers” will cross over to the new event to have a shot at Olympic glory. But 100 meters total of running on sand? 250 meters of rowing? It sounds like a joke, an event created for Baywatch.

I won’t get into all the political discussions here. The IOC wants weight divisions only in combat sports—boxing, wrestling, judo—where the threat of someone getting seriously injured by a bigger opponent needs to be taken seriously. The argument also goes that lightweights can compete with openweight athletes. In Paris, the times for lightweight medalists in the double sculls were faster than those of the openweight doubles. But wind conditions on any racecourse are never the same from day to day. The success of fast lightweight crews may have undermined their best argument for being—that bigger people have a significant advantage in sports.

To make lightweight crews fly, they must be very precise, because they don’t have extra power at their disposal. Ask lightweights what it’s like to row with other people their size, and you’ll hear passionate defenses of how right a boat with people the same size feels. From what I saw coaching lightweights and watching them push themselves in their training, they certainly were just as intense and just as motivated as openweight athletes. Probably more so in many cases because they were always fighting to show that they belong in a sport that celebrates the Olympic motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius (Swifter, Higher, Stronger).

Those early lightweights were fighters because it was an uphill battle to be included. They heard that they were like “midget basketball.” They were called “oxygen thieves.” In many boathouses, the refrain was “men, women, and lightweights.” Most of the time, these nicknames were accepted with humor. I loved their trailblazing, their determination.

I’m not at all anti-openweight. The absolute fury with which our men’s four blasted off from the start and then kept going gave me goose bumps and still does as I watch the replays. Karolien Florijn, the Dutch woman’s sculler, had the same kind of race. That’s what a gold medal is all about. But it makes me sad that we won’t see that awesome Irish light double or the British light women rowing so beautifully again.

Farewell lightweights. Hello Beach Sprints.

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