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Some of our sport’s fastest crews train on some of the worst bodies of water for rowing.
Sure, the best rowing waters in the world also produce some of the other fastest crews. The Henley stretch of the River Thames gave us Redgrave, Pinsent, and the continuous stream of Great Britain’s world and Olympic champions, many of whom train out of Leander Club and race at Henley Royal Regatta.
Sarasota Crew’s Casey Galvanek selected and coached the Olympic champion U.S. men’s four at Nathan Benderson Park in Florida, where the national team trains, holds speed orders, and races the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Lucerne’s Rotsee—“the lake of the Gods”—is the favorite body of water of most international rowers.
But Denmark’s Guldfieren (“Gold Four”), winners of three Olympic golds, six total Olympic medals, and seven worlds in the men’s lightweight four from 1994 and 2016, trained on some pretty crappy water.
The first time I was shown the 800-meter city-park lake on which Seattle’s Green Lake Crew trains, I thought my buddy was punking me. He wasn’t; they really train there—and have won youth nationals doing so.
Speaking of crappy, Boston’s Charles River often flows with what is euphemistically called “combined sewer overflows” yet is still home to some of the world’s fastest junior, collegiate, elite, and masters rowers.
RowAmerica Rye, whose men’s and women’s eights have captured multiple youth national championships, trains on what men’s coach Aleks Radovic calls “the crappiest water in America” (not true when the Charles is experiencing CSOs).
As Bob Ford, a seven-time Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year, points out in his story in the May issue of Rowing News, Radovic and women’s coach Marko Serafimovski know it’s not the water, or the boats in it, that really matter. It’s the people in the boats— both coaching launches and rowing shells—that make crews go fast.
