The Five Biggest Myths In Rowing

Myth No. 1: “It’s such an expensive sport.”

It’s not.

Sure, you can spend $100,000 buying and outfitting a new eight, especially if you add a Peach system and other options. But you can pick up a good used shell that’s the right size for the intended athletes for less than $10,000 from any number of the established boatbuilders. (A local university or club might provide an even better bargain.)

Compare that to what it costs to outfit a hockey team, ski racer, or cyclist on a per-athlete basis.

“The idea that rowing is an ‘expensive sport’ gets repeated all the time,” said CJ Bown, vice president of sales at Pocock Racing Shells, “but a lot of it comes from people misunderstanding how the equipment actually works.

“Right now, on the Finish Line Rowing website, 12 of the 15 used eights listed are under $10,000. Programs don’t need to buy new boats every year. It’s fun. It’s nice. And don’t get me wrong, I love selling new boats, but they aren’t always the right answer for every club.

“If a club can save money on boats, they can invest it somewhere that actually moves the needle—better coaching, better coaching education, and building a deeper program.”

Rowing is a relative bargain, since our equipment lasts seemingly forever. I scull a Van Dusen Advantage single that’s just as capable of winning the Head of the Charles as it was when it was made—in 1997—even if its operator isn’t.

“Carbon doesn’t ‘go bad,'” Bown said. “Boats need maintenance and occasional refurbishment, but the boat lasts a long time.

“Now, that doesn’t mean new boats aren’t important. Manufacturers have made real improvements over the years. Customer service and support are better. Those are very real reasons programs choose to buy new boats.”

You can get started in the sport of indoor rowing on the same equipment with which the best in the world train and compete— the Concept2 RowErg. Price: $990. Again, the equipment lasts practically forever; my 1994 erg is still in regular use.

Rowing clubs charge so little for Learn to Row programs and continuing membership that there’s a new venture in the business of growing rowing clubs with financially viable models built for the long term. The company’s name, Growyourclub.com, says it all. Key to making it work, said Ruben Rapi the co-owner and a former U23 Swedish national-team rower, is charging more, rather than less, for basic program fees. It’s about giving the clubs the tools, systems, and strategies to bring in more members, grow their income, improve their service, and retain people for the long run.

Myth No. 2: “Rowing’s not a spectator sport.”

“Follow the money” is a tried-and-true axiom in investigative reporting, and the $45,000 gate at the 2024 IRA National Championship Regatta at Mercer Lake shows how much people want to watch great rowing.

The 2.8 million viewers who tuned in to last year’s Boat Race certainly found rowing a sport worth seeing, and the peak audience of 2.18 million who witnessed the 2025 women’s Boat Race made it the most-watched women’s sporting event in the UK last year. The 200,000 who went to see it in person certainly consider it a spectator sport, as does the city of London, which benefited to the tune of 15 million pounds ($19.8 million).

Streaming service Overnght continues to pour money into our sport to buy the broadcast rights to just about every regatta founder Kevin McReynolds can sign up—and it’s making money doing so. Subscribers pay $105 a year for unlimited viewing, and McReynolds can’t add regattas fast enough.

“Rowing has always been a spectator sport, but people were not able to view it consistently before the new age of streaming,” said McReynolds. “We have found that once fans can follow races live, understand the storylines, and see the intensity on the water, they stay, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing reflected in subscriber growth on Overnght.”

The sold-out crowd at the last Olympic regatta roared as the Sinkovic brothers sprinted through the pairs final to win the gold on the last stroke of the race. You needn’t have watched rowing before to sense what was going on and to feel the thrill of that incredible contest.

Our sport is intrinsically and naturally a spectator sport. We just have to get folks down to the water to see it. Selling them something nice to eat and drink while they’re there doesn’t hurt, either, as Henley Royal Regatta proves to the hundreds of thousands who flock to the Thames every summer.

Myth No. 3: “The problem with U.S. rowing is that we don’t scull.”

Not only do we scull but many of us scull quite well, thank you very much!

The U.S. is the current world champion in the women’s lightweight single, thanks to Michelle Sechser, who at some point in her career probably got some medical support from Dr. Kris Karlson, who volunteers for the national team and won both the 1988 and 1989 worlds in the same event, plus another gold in the lightweight double in 1989.

From Anne Marden’s 1984 (quad) and 1988 (single) silver Olympic medals to Jakob Plihal’s World Rowing Cup silver medal last year in Varese, American scullers have been on the podium at elite international competition regularly.

True, the breakthrough gold medals haven’t been there in traditional flat-water Olympic sculling since the gold of Brad Lewis and Paul Enquist in 1984, but Chris Bak is already the most decorated Beach Sprint sculler, and a favorite for Olympic golds—in both the men’s single and mixed double—when the sport makes its debut at the LA2028 Games.

Many of those who perpetuate the “Americans don’t scull” fallacy have experienced our sport primarily through their college rowing experiences, often in the last century. It’s true that university rowing, especially at the top IRA schools (and certainly in the days when “the boats were made of wood and the oarsmen of iron”) was almost exclusively sweep rowing in eights, except when you might seat-race in and/or row in prep school in coxed fours.

But this isn’t your grandfather’s sport anymore.

The most popular events at North America’s biggest regattas are often sculling events. In November, the youth doubles at one of the largest races in America, the Head of the Hooch, drew 106 boats each in the men’s and women’s youth doubles. Sculling events often outdraw sweep events at the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta in August.

Beyond the part of rowing that matters most—racing—the part we spend the most time doing—training—has come to involve sculling significantly, even in programs that race eights exclusively.

“Every program has been adding sculling boats to its fleet,” said Vespoli USA’s Dave Trond, who, as the president of the largest boatbuilder in America, should know.

Practically every oarsman at Dartmouth College is provided a single to scull, and scull they do, especially in the autumn and during the two training trips they take every year. All three of the Big Green’s varsity coaches were international scullers. Heavyweight head coach Wyatt Allen won the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley Royal Regatta (as well as gold and bronze Olympic medals in the eight); lightweight head coach Trevor Michelson represented the U.S. at the World University Games in 2015 in the lightweight single; and women’s head coach John Graves is an eight-time U.S. national team member as a sculler, and advanced to the final of the Diamonds at Henley in 2017

Last year, Dartmouth finished second in the lightweight national championship, third in the heavyweight national championship, and the women qualified for the NCAAs for the first time in 13 years. Who beat them? Washington was the men’s IRA heavyweight champ, stroked by Ryan Martin, an American sculler who won the youth national championship in the quad. Stanford won the NCAA championship and celebrated with a trip to Henley, where it entered a quad.

So, yeah, we scull. It’s just that the eight is the premier event, so the top athletes—many of whom are also scullers—row sweep in the championship regattas.

Myth No. 4: “American juniors can’t make the varsity in college.”

Four of the women in the Yale boat that set a record in winning the first-eight grand final at the 2025 NCAAs are from the U.S., so clearly the statement that Americans can’t make collegiate varsities isn’t true. But the myth has its origin in facts.

Several IRA-winning men’s heavyweight varsities in this century have had few—and some zero—U.S. oarsmen in the boat. Rowing News has told the story of how the recruitment of European rowers by Ivy League schools in the late 1900s began the now-common practice of university scouts traveling the world to find talented junior rowers to fill out their rosters.

A month doesn’t go by without my receiving an email about how there’s no room for American kids in American collegiate rowing, often with spreadsheets and roster summaries attached. It’s never from someone younger than me.

In one way, the complaints are right: Rowing is truly international. American university coaches are paid to develop crews that compete with other crews developed by other paid professional coaches, and they are judged by their competitive records, not by how many U.S. kids they have in their top boats.

When reporting our story on coach compensation last year, we found a lot of six-figure-plus contracts, and not one stipulated that the coach recruit and train U.S. athletes preferentially.

U.S. junior rowers generally do quite well at the World Rowing Under 19 championships, but a lot of other countries do even better. The U.S. is just one supplier of recruits for the best university-level rowing country in the world— the USA.

So it stands to reason that the rosters of the best rowing universities in the world are full of the best rowers from around the world, not just the U.S. Are the critics jingoistic or just nostalgic for the way it was when they rowed in college and fell in love with our sport? Like it or not, collegiate rowing is just another thing that brings many of the best in the world to the USA.

Or, as a veteran coach at one of the world’s most esteemed universities told an old griper, “So what? What’s your point?”

Myth No. 5: “We can’t do [something new or different] because….”

Rowers are experts. Just ask us. Actually, don’t bother, because a veteran oarsman is sure to mansplain why it won’t work.

For 33 years, Rowing News has succeeded as an independent niche publication—something we were assured would never work.

One assumes the Yale oarsmen who smeared oatmeal in their boat to fashion the original sliding seats were told it would never work, too. Our thanks for not listening and giving us sliding seats.

Big blades, called “hatchet blades” in the early ’90s when they replaced tulip-shaped blades, might have been shunned if they hadn’t come from the Dreissigackers, the brains behind Concept2, and been used by winning crews. Some who were losing to early adopters of the big blades tried to get them banned, instead of accepting the reality that the new oars were better.

The superior design prevailed, and our sport improved. New ideas keep coming and making our rowing experiences better. Boats used to be too heavy for just eight kids to carry, but now middle-school rowing is taking off and they can carry their own equipment. Recently, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the brave women who fought for the equal treatment promised by Title IX, and today women’s collegiate rowing is arguably bigger and better than men’s (which also has come a long way in 50 years).

While rowing, we may be going backward, but our sport continues to go forward.

CHIP DAVIS is the founder and publisher of Rowing News. An oarsman from birth, he rowed on championship crews at St. Paul’s School and Dartmouth College, where he captained the lightweights. Now he sculls in Vermont when the weather is suitable and ergs the other half of the year.

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