This summer’s Paris Olympic Games will be the last to feature rowing as we know it. Not only will 2024 be the end of lightweight rowing in the Olympics but also the 2,000-meter race distance will be shortened to 1,500 meters for LA2028, and Beach Sprints will be the new Olympic rowing discipline replacing lightweights. You read that right: they’re not going to race the full 2K distance in 2028.

The changes are occurring because the sport’s international governing body, World Rowing, is following International Olympic Committee fads and depending on IOC grant money rather than selling what is actually working in our sport—head races, lightweight rowing, racing on rivers—to the IOC, sponsors, and the viewing public.

Less startling than the loss of lightweight events and the shortened race distance but perhaps more detrimental to our sport’s long-term Olympic health is how a handful of wealthy western European countries dominate international competition in boring, homogeneous style, while the diversity and inclusion provided by lightweight rowing wither with its removal from the Olympics.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and for many years our sport’s leaders at FISA, the precursor to World Rowing, the international governing body, worked hard to nurture and grow rowing so that it wouldn’t end up like this.

But it’s been 10 years since Samsung’s sponsorship of World Rowing ceased. It’s been even longer since interest in and, importantly, broadcast viewership of rowing peaked with the 2012 London Olympics, where the stands were sold out every day, TV broadcasts attracted significant global audiences, and an African nation won gold in rowing for the first time ever.

Those broadcast audiences are what TV rights-holders, like NBC in the U.S., pay the IOC billions of dollars for, and that revenue—especially in lieu of having major sponsorship—pays for World Rowing to run the sport on the elite level, putting on the World Rowing Cup, World Rowing Championships, and Olympic regattas.

Viewers continue to move from free over-the-air broadcast to paid cable and streaming services. Live sports attract viewers like nothing else, and broadcasters compete to pay huge and increasing sums for broadcast rights. In the U.S., that means football. Forbes recently reported that more Americans watched NFL games on TV in 2023 than any other programming, accounting for 93 of the 100 highest-rated shows.

In 2014, NBC agreed to pay almost $8 billion (yes, billion) for the American media rights to the Olympics through 2032.

“This remains, arguably, Thomas Bach’s most significant contribution to the movement’s health and well-being since arriving in the president’s seat in 2013,” wrote David Owen for InsideTheGames.biz.

But Owen went on to warn that the days of the big-money deals are numbered, as viewership declined while the Games were held in Asia (the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021).

“The myriad members of the Olympic food chain would be well advised to plan accordingly,” concluded Owens.

World Rowing is a hungry member of that food chain, receiving most of its annual revenue (65 to 70 percent) as an IOC grant derived from Games’ broadcast rights, according to Colin Smith, a former world-champion oarsman and past president of Rowing Australia who now works in the media-rights industry and founded the Global Media & Sports consultancy.

“We have the third-highest athlete quota at the Olympic Games, and if we’re ranking 24th or 25th in attendance and television audiences, the math of that doesn’t work long term,” reported Smith.

Of the 10,500 athletes at the Paris Games, 502–or about five percent—will be rowers, but rowing won’t come close to drawing five percent of the global TV audience of over three billion.

The IOC puts rowing in Group C of its A-through-F popularity rankings, based heavily on TV viewership and internet traffic. Athletics (track and field) and aquatics are in Group A, with canoe and kayak down in Group D. Sports new to the Olympic program begin in Group F and are added primarily because the IOC expects them to be popular (case in point: flag football, backed by the NFL, which runs ads for the sport during game broadcasts; each ad is seen by more people than see an entire year of rowing).

Without compelling story lines like Steve Redgrave winning his fifth Olympic gold medal in Sydney 2000 or the thrilling racing of London 2012, when the home team won nine medals (four gold), rowing’s risk of being downgraded, and the corresponding loss of IOC grant money, is real.

The current leadership of World Rowing is well aware of the problem.

“World Rowing needs to become less dependent on the Olympic revenue,” wrote Treasurer Gerritjan Eggenkamp in his 2023 report. “The current cost base to deliver on what is expected by all stakeholders from World Rowing is above the revenues World Rowing generates. Secondly, costs are rapidly increasing.”

Caught between the rock of a ban on new venues and the hard place of the prohibitive cost of renovating Long Beach to 2,000 meters, World Rowing settled on the 1,500-meter solution for LA2028 (see the Rowing News interview with Matt Smith following this story). But it’s only for LA2028. World Rowing Championships and all other World Rowing elite events will be raced over 2,000 meters before and after the 2028 Olympic regatta, including the qualifying events.

The IOC was also behind World Rowing’s cutting of lightweight events, something current World Rowing Executive Director Vincent Gaillard assured Rowing News won’t mean the end of lightweight events in the rest of elite rowing. World Rowing issued a similar statement in October 2023: “Lightweight events will not disappear from the World Rowing events program in the foreseeable future. As is the case today with non-Olympic events, they will still be offered at the World Rowing Cups and World Rowing Championships.”

But without lightweight events in the Olympics, national governing bodies will stop supporting lightweights. Entries at world championships will fall below the numbers World Rowing requires for inclusion in future regattas, and lightweight events will be dropped. That’s exactly what’s happened to the women’s lightweight four and men’s lightweight eight. The men’s lightweight quad and women’s lightweight pair are next.

Gaillard has high hopes and expectations for Beach Sprints and indoor rowing. Both have produced modest numbers for World Rowing thus far, including only 2,200 entries in this month’s World Rowing Indoor Championships in Prague (domestic head races such as the Head of the Schuylkill and the Head of the Hooch attract more than twice as many). Significant growth and popularity have yet to be seen and measured in any of World Rowing’s new disciplines.

“They’re super overworked and busy,” said former Executive Director Matt Smith of the World Rowing crew. “I don’t know if they’re running out of time to do everything they’re trying to do.”

The World Rowing staff is overseen now by Executive Director Vincent Gaillard, a Swiss executive from outside rowing who was appointed to succeed Smith after he had held the post for a quarter-century.

World Rowing is led by President Jean-Christophe Rolland, who was elected at the 2013 FISA Ordinary Congress to succeed Denis Oswald, who had done the job for 24 years.

An oarsman from the age of 13, Rolland, now 55, won Olympic gold in the men’s pair at the 2000 Sydney Games. He joined the FISA athletes’ commission in 1994, became its chair in 2002, and joined the overall executive committee in 2004. He is not new at this, and brings the same dedication and effort he used to set a French national erg record of 5:46 as an athlete.

“He works his ass off,” said Martin Cross, the British Olympic champion (1984 coxed four) and prominent rowing broadcast commentator, on his YouTube show, Crossy’s Corner.

Rolland is also a member of the International Olympic Committee, which gives him inside leverage representing the sport of rowing and preserving its place in the Olympic Games.

Rolland missed the window to comment for this story because he was traveling to Korea for the Youth Winter Olympic Games but in the past he has said: “We cannot continue with a world championship with 29 events. We cannot continue with the status quo of classic rowing. Some changes are required. The credibility of our sport is at stake.”

World Rowing is working with Deloitte, the huge international consulting, auditing, and advisory firm (which uses rowing imagery on its website) on a “Strategic Commercial Partnership/Investment Project.” World Rowing also has launched a “Strategic Event & Calendar Reassessment” to “future-proof” the sport, according to documents from the 2023 World Rowing Congress.

“We are undergoing now a complete event and calendar review, across the board, across all events, to look at everything—what needs to be improved, what needs to be changed, created, whatever,” said Gaillard. “That work is ongoing, and we’ll finish at the end of 2024. That will lead, we hope, to a new calendar for the future that will be post-LA in effect.

“It’s a big deal for us. It’s really defining our future calendars and the future formats of events, and anything can come out of it. The outcome of that will be at the end of 2024 and will be approved at our congress in 2025 and rolled out after. It could be a pretty significant change.”

Promising developments include an upcoming announcement in the late winter or early spring of a commercial sponsor partnering with World Rowing. Gaillard also mentioned the continuing work to develop a Beach Sprint league with franchises, like professional sports teams, comprised of athletes from around the world. But that’s years away.

“For the near term, for the next four years before the Olympics in LA, we have already made changes, but we have committed to have three World [Rowing] Cups still.”

Gaillard is not worried that elite rowing’s relatively low popularity will lead to its getting cut from the Olympic Games.

“No concern whatsoever. The world could not understand why lightweight rowing makes sense, but the position of classic rowing in the Olympics is not at all threatened.”

Global Media & Sport’s Colin Smith believes World Rowing has recognized the challenge and is focused correctly on protecting rowing’s place in the Olympic Games. But he questions its current strategy for attracting attention, earning general popularity, and gaining viewership. On Crossy’s Corner, Smith said of Beach Sprints: “As currently configured, I don’t think it’s a compelling broadcast.”

Keeping and growing the more than three billion people who watch the Olympics require appealing to a more global audience than just the 330 million people in the U.S.t and 750 million in Europe. Lightweight events provided rowing opportunities for countries beyond Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, as Matt Smith states in the Rowing News interview following this feature.

“As development director starting in 1992,” recalled Smith, about the days before lightweight-rowing events were added to the Olympics, “I would meet with Asian sports ministers and national Olympic committee presidents who would say, “Rowing! Are you crazy? We have no chance against those huge Russians, Germans and Americans! We are not investing in rowing!”

The only Olympic rowing gold medal ever won by an African nation came from the South African lightweight straight four in London 2012, but in their efforts to keep in step with the IOC, World Rowing cut the event.

“What can I say? It was a decision out of our hands,” said Smith. “That’s life in the Olympic bubble.”

It’s a bad move, says Colin Smith.

“I’m disappointed. It did give us the universality connection to the world. Brazil, Chile, and South Africa were all first-time winners through lightweight rowing.”

Consulting giant LEK, where Smith worked for 20 years before founding his firm, produced a review for FISA in 2004, 10 years and three Olympics after lightweight rowing had been added to the program. It found that lightweight events were a positive improvement, said Smith.

Beach Sprints is a contrived spectacle, whereas lightweight rowing, whose 72 Olympic spots it’s taking, “wasn’t an invented competition,” Smith continued. “At its roots, it’s not dying.”

Racing on rivers, as opposed to the man-made rowing courses that host most World Rowing and Olympic regattas, is also not dying. In fact, the three most popular, attractive, and watched rowing events in the world—the Head of the Charles, Henley Royal Regatta, and The Boat Race—are all raced on rivers.

The opening ceremonies for this summer’s Olympic Games will be held on the River Seine as it winds through the heart of Paris. Brisbane, host for the 2032 Summer Olympics, features the Brisbane River running right through the center of the city. The proper Olympic race distance of 2,000 meters is based on the length of the longest straight stretch of the River Thames, the 2,112-meters of the Henley course, used in the 1948 London Summer Olympics.

Boosted by being awarded the 2024 Summer Games, Paris has invested $1.5 billion in cleaning up the River Seine. A massive underground rainwater-storage tank has been constructed to help keep the sewers from overflowing, and a water-treatment system cleans runoff before it enters the river. For the first time in a century, it will be safe to swim in the Seine, and certainly safe to row on. Imagine the crowds sprint match racing or mass-start distance races could entertain in the middle of an Olympic city during the Summer Games, while also showcasing rowing.

Local organizers in Brisbane have talked informally with the IOC’s programming committee about holding a head race on the Brisbane River in the second week of the Games after the classic rowing events have concluded. The idea, said Colin Smith, was received enthusiastically by the IOC people but since it didn’t come from World Rowing, it might not get any further than that.

Holding Olympic rowing of any kind on the Seine or Brisbane rivers hasn’t even been considered, said World Rowing’s Gaillard.

“I don’t think it’s ever been discussed seriously. The discussion has been about ‘How do we include coastal?’ and ‘How do we include indoor rowing?’”

The latter won’t happen in the summer or winter Games, Gaillard said, but in future Olympic eSports games, which have been announced already.

Changing the Olympic program to allow or even encourage athletes to race in multiple events is another opportunity for rowing to develop the kind of stars who bring attention and support to Olympic sports. If the size of Olympic medals were proportional to the degree of difficulty in winning multiples, Redgrave’s would be dinner plates and Michael Phelps’s would be poker chips.

Holding small-boat races in the first half of the week of the Olympic regatta and team-boat races in the second half is one way to create multiple-medal opportunities. Romanian rowers succeeded in qualifying more boats for the Olympics at last year’s Worlds by doubling up some top athletes. But qualifying is a far cry from winning at the Olympics, so the world’s best rowers almost always stick to a single event in the current Olympic program.

Change is possible.

“No decision yet,” Gaillard said, “but in consideration.”

World Rowing’s continued devotion to six-across, buoyed-lane racing, in what are essentially massive and expensive swimming pools, and a Europe-based, three-regatta World Rowing Cup series that has seen dwindling participation (mostly finals only at World Rowing Cup I in 2023) shows what happens when administrators adhere slavishly to past practices rather than embrace innovations that are succeeding outside the elite echelons of rowing. The slow pace of change and lack of creativity at World Rowing leave our sport, at the top level at least, chasing the times and suffering the consequences of lagging behind.