From The Editor: Crossing the Line First

Rowing is not an expensive sport.

Often for free, you can hop on an erg (a.k.a. “indoor rower”) at practically any gym, CrossFit box, or YMCA, with no instruction, training, or prior experience, and just row.

If, like most of us, your first rowing experience comes in a school or club setting, the boats, oars, electronics, and coaching are all provided—that is, paid for already by others (and used by many, many more). Even if you start from scratch with the best brand-new equipment, you can have a Concept2 RowErg, the standard for our sport both indoor and out, delivered to you for about a thousand bucks. Try buying Olympic-level equipment in any other racing sport, or starting for free in any other NCAA Division I championship sport, before repeating the myth that rowing is “so expensive.”

Rowing is also not complicated—first one across the line wins, period, whether it’s the classic form of rowing, the oldest intercollegiate sport both in the world and in the U.S. (Oxford-Cambridge, 1829  and Harvard-Yale, 1852) or the newest Olympic sport of Beach Sprints (see page 25 of the December issue of Rowing News), which is proving to be a terrific hybrid—both not expensive (World Rowing provides standardized equipment for competitors on site) and not complicated (the start/finish line and entire racecourse are visible to all spectators—it’s literally a day at the beach).

So it’s fitting that we celebrate the best of our sport in 2025 in the same issue as we deliver Martin Cross’s authoritative coverage of this year’s World Rowing Beach Sprints Final, the world championship of rowing’s newest attraction.

In each category—boat, coach, and athlete—we’ve selected deserving recipients as well as a number of honorable mentions, all of whom achieved the same feat in 2025: They crossed the line first.