Folks …
Racing this weekend will be highlighted by a Battle of the Blue Crews, as LWs from Navy and Yale meet for the 7th time to contest for the Eads Johnson Trophy on Lake Carnegie in Princeton, NJ. The series is tied 3 – 3, with Yale defending, having won 2 of the past 3 1st Varsity races. This will be the opening race of the 2010 season for the Y150s. Last week, the N150s dropped a tough race to 2009 National Champion Princeton on the Severn.
Folks …
Racing this weekend will be highlighted by a Battle of the Blue Crews, as LWs from Navy and Yale meet for the 7th time to contest for the Eads Johnson Trophy on Lake Carnegie in Princeton, NJ. The series is tied 3 – 3, with Yale defending, having won 2 of the past 3 1st Varsity races. This will be the opening race of the 2010 season for the Y150s. Last week, the N150s dropped a tough race to 2009 National Champion Princeton on the Severn.
Yale HWs will welcome Brown to the Housatonic River in Derby. This will be the opening race for Yale. Last Weekend racing against some of the top competition from around the country, the Brown men’s crew opened its season with an impressive second place finish in the Copley Cup varsity eight at the San Diego Crew Classic, taking the Michalson Cup against Boston University in the process. The Bears easily took the silver, finishing well ahead of the rest of the field in 5:53.63, though they could not reel in Cal, which won the event in 5:49.50. The Bruno HW 2V also placed second to Cal in their grand final on Mission Bay. Last year Brown swept all five races over the Bulldogs.
Navy HWs will open the season at the George Washington Invitational on the Potomac in Washington, DC, 9 and 10 April.
The top-ranked [CRCA/US Rowing national poll] Yale women’s crew will face a big test this weekend. The Bulldogs will race three times in two days, starting Friday against Cornell and Syracuse competing for the Cayuga Cup. On Saturday, Yale faces No. 7 Michigan State in the morning and the University of Buffalo in the afternoon. All three races will be on the Cayuga Lake Inlet in Ithaca, N.Y.
The Bulldogs opened the season with a sweep of Penn and Columbia last Saturday, retaining the Connell Cup. Saturday is the opening race of the spring season for Cornell, who scrimmaged Ithaca last weekend.
Syracuse captured the Kittell Cup in its opening race of the spring, defeating Boston University. Michigan State’s varsity eight was named the Big Ten Boat of the Week after defeating Michigan and Notre Dame last weekend. The Spartans finished sixth at last year’s NCAA Championships and are the two-time defending Big Ten champions. Buffalo Bulls raced Notre Dame and Indiana last weekend.
Yale will be looking to capture the Cayuga Cup for the ninth straight year in the varsity eight race with Cornell and Syracuse.
Navy Women’s Crew will be in Philadelphia on the Schuylkill River on Saturday competing against a large array of Dad Vail and Patriot League Crews in the Murphy Cup Regatta hosted by Temple.
In The Boat Race, Oxford and Cambridge Blues [Dark and Light, respectively] will race over 4 1/4 miles on the Thames River in London for the 156th time on Saturday. On Race Day, up to 250,000 spectators crowd the banks of the Thames from Putney to Mortlake to witness the action. Cambridge currently lead the series since 1829 by 79-75. Oxford won the 2009 Race by 3 1/2 lengths. After 7 consecutive wins by the Cambridge Light Blues, Oxford was the victor in 2000. Including that race, in the past 10 years, the Oxford Dark Blues are 7-3. In 2003, Oxford won by just one foot – probably the closest Boat Race of all-time given that the “1877 Dead Heat” was recorded as “by six feet to Oxford”.
Oxford is heavily favored by the book makers in London. Odds on Oxford are 2/5, while Cambridge is 7/4.
{n.b. Jimmy Joy} The 2010 Boat Race will feature the first Irish rower to represent either Blue Boat in 20 years.
Martin Walsh, who is in the 2 seat for Oxford, becomes only the 13th oarsman from Eire to compete in the event, having previously stroked Isis to victory in the 2009 reserve Race and rowed in the 4 seat of the winning 2008 Isis boat.
The last Irishman to compete in the Race was Paddy Mant who rowed for Cambridge in 1989 and 1990, while the first was Richard Townsend in 1856.
The Boat Race begins Saturday at 1630 BST [1130 EDT] and will be covered live on BBC One/online 1515 – 1715 BST [1015 – 1215 EDT]. You should be able to check out the racing at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcone/watchlive/
The Championship Course
The Boat Race course is just one small part of the Tideway – the tidal stretch of the Thames that reaches down from Teddington Lock through central London to the open sea. For hundreds of years the Tideway has been the venue for great rowing events, including Dogett’s Coat and Badge, the oldest sculling race in the world, while the Championship Course between Putney and Mortlake has been home to the Boat race every year since 1845.
The tides that mark this stretch of the Thames mean that the line of the fastest stream varies according to the level of water in the river, as well as wind and weather. The bends in the river mean that different parts of the course are exposed to winds from different directions which adds further mystery to the unpredictable conditions. The race is generally held on the incoming ‘flood’ tide, one hour before high water at Putney. This means the crews will race against the stream, but with the flow of the tide, and the cox of each crew will spend many hours working with professional Thames watermen, past coxes and specialist coxing coaches to learn where their best course may lie on Race Day.
The Boat Race course is marked by three classic bends, two in favour of the Middlesex station, on the north bank of the Thames, while the third favours the crew drawn on the opposite Surrey station. In spite of these bends the course is theoretically fair – the start and finish lines are exactly parallel, and in the unlikely event of the crews staying level throughout the race, they will both have covered the magic Boat Race distance of exactly 4 miles 374 yards.
The start of the race is marked by the University stone, a few hundred yards upstream from Putney Road Bridge and for the first quarter of a mile, as the crews pass the historic boathouses of Putney Embankment, the course is quite straight. Then begins the first Middlesex bend, said to be worth a third of a length advantage to the crew drawn on that station. The bend is almost three quarters of a mile long, and takes the crews past the Fulham Football ground at Craven Cottage and up towards the Mile Post.
The Mile is the first of the classic race timing points and is marked by a bust of Steve Fairbairn, four times a Boat Race oarsman for Cambridge in the 1880s, and founder of the Head of the River Race some forty years later. Oxford got to the Mile in 3 mins 31 secs in 1978 and Cambridge equalled that record 15 years later with the crew that brought an end to the Oxford dominance of the race which had spanned almost twenty years.
For the next two miles the bend in the river is entirely in favour of the crew drawn on Surrey (the south side of the river) and is said to be worth about one length to the inside crew. The first landmark after the Mile is Harrod’s Repository, the furniture warehouse built by the Knightsbridge store over 100 years ago. This fine Victorian building was constructed using bricks gleaned from the rebuilt Piccadilly underground station, and following Harrods’ removal to a computerised warehouse in Osterley it has now been converted to luxury flats.
Near the apex of the Surrey bend is Hammersmith Bridge, the only road bridge crossing the course. Cambridge reached this point in 6 mins 20 secs in 1998 with the crew which trounced the record for each subsequent marker all the way up the course. The crews pass St Paul’s School boathouse on the Surrey bank and the historic Doves public house on the Middlesex shore before reaching the two mile mark.
By now the race has reached that stretch of the course known as Chiswick Reach, marked by the narrow island, Chiswick Eyot, near the Middlesex bank, and a terrace of fine Georgian mansions on Chiswick Mall, the road which runs along the northern shore.
At the end of Chiswick Reach is the third timing marker, Chiswick Steps, reached by the 1998 Cambridge boat in 9 mins 56 secs, but then the Surrey bend begins to even out as the crews approach the three mile mark. Here is the point known as the Crossing where the best line for the crews lies directly across the middle of the river; this is where the racing craft lose the shelter of the shore and may be at their most vulnerable from the prevailing south-westerly wind. It was a wind from this direction that was responsible for the last sinking at this point when Cambridge went down in 1978.
Now begins the third and final bend in favour of the crew on Middlesex. The race passes under the girders of Barnes Railway Bridge and now there is barely three quarters of a mile to go. The crew that is down at this point has a daunting task ahead. Only twice in the history of the race has the losing crew at this point gone on to win the race. This happened in 1952 and again, 50 years later in 2002. On the Middlesex shore are the vantage points of the playing fields of Dukes Meadow, while the Surrey bank is marked by the White Hart public house and Mortlake Brewery.
The Finish Line is just a few yards downstream from Chiswick road bridge and here the crowds on Race Day are as densely packed as those near the Start. What those crowds witness as the crews cross the Line is the ecstasy of the victors and the despair of the losing crew. The Cambridge record breakers of ‘98 got here in 16 mins 19 secs, breaking the previous record by a staggering 26 secs. Whether one of this year’s crews can come anywhere near that time remains to be seen!
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If you go to The Boat Race web site you can see some great art work from the Henley River & Rowing Museum collection of Tom “Big Gulp” Weil, Yale ’70. Go to
click on THE RACE
click on IMAGES FROM BOAT RACE HISTORY
click on ART WORKS and click on CARTOONS and ILLUSTRATIONS
One sample:
The Dead Heat, 1877, lithograph by Charles Robinson, reproduced courtesy of Thomas E. Weil collection, River & Rowing Museum
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Other EARC competition this weekend:
EARC HM:
Brown vs. Yale, Derby, CT
Alumni Cup – MIT vs. Columbia, Pelham, NY
Harvard vs. Cornell, Ithaca, NY
Dartmouth vs. Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
Georgetown vs. Princeton, Princeton, NJ
EARC LM:
Johnson Trophy – Yale vs. Navy, Princeton, NJ
Penn and Dartmouth vs. MIT, Boston, MA
Delaware vs. Harvard, Boston, MA
Columbia and Georgetown vs. Princeton, Princeton, NJ
EAWRC:
Dale England Cup: Indiana Univ. Boston Univ. Dayton Miami Central Florida, Bloomington, IN
Brown vs. Radcliffe, Seekonk River, Providence, RI
Cornell vs. Buffalo/Gonzaga/Michigan State, Cayuga Inlet, Ithaca, NY
Yale vs. Michigan State, Cayuga Inlet, Ithaca, NY
Yale vs. Buffalo, Cayuga Inlet, Ithaca, NY
Cayuga Cup: Cornell vs. Syracuse/Yale, Cayuga Inlet, Ithaca, NY [Friday 2 April]
Holy Cross/M. I. T./Massachusetts/New Hampshire/Williams, Lake Quinsigamond, Worcester, MA
Northeastern vs. Boston College/Dartmouth/Rhode Island, Charles River, Cambridge, MA
Princeton vs. Columbia/Rutgers, Carnegie Lake, Princeton, NJ
Patriot League/Dad Vail:
Murphy Cup, Schuylkill River – Philadelphia – Collegiate Men and Women – Navy Women
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Barrel Roll – Tom Weil shared some interesting video footage of a schoolboy regatta in Melbourne, Australia, that I thought might be of interest. It may remind you of the IRA on the Ohio River in Marietta, when Navy [all 3 shells] along with many other crews sank their boats after colliding with underwater hazards in the flooding river. It was Plebe year for the Navy “Great Eight” — the “Admirals” sank after three strokes of the start.
www.row2k.com/video/view.cfm?vid=9299
I have seen the “catching of a crab” while in the bow seat as well as the coaching launch — some, spectacularly worthy of high points for style and degree of difficulty; watched oarsmen jump from a boat to lighten the load, unable to row due broken equipment and even will admit to ever so slowly “rolling” a double into the Charles River. However all nine over together even beats the Chinese Collegiate crew who continued to row a sinking shell at the Head of the Charles a few years back.
Courtesy of Row2k is this photo of a USA 8+ at the 2009 World Championships. The antithesis of the earlier video and how it is supposed to be done!
Fixing a boat’s set can be fiendishly complicated. Setting a boat properly depends on so many things — and so many things, in turn, depend on the boat being set. It may seem counterintuitive that one of the ways to solve something as broad and overarching is to go at it in small details.
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In other rowing news of note:
Dubai World may have been rescued from the brink of bankruptcy by the UAE, but they have not tempered their desire for promotion including newsworthy construction — world’s tallest building, man made islands; and prestige sporting events — tennis, golf, sailing [except for court rulings they would have hosted the most recent America’s Cup won by USA’s BMW/Oracle] and now rowing! According to the report from Row2k below, the Dad Vail will be hosted in Dubai in 2011.
After the great success of the new rowing venue in Oklahoma City, Barrow, Alaska has launched a formidable campaign to site the summer US Rowing Center on nearby Emaiksoun Lake. Former Alaska Governor and VP candidate, Sarah Palin is chairman of the select blue ribbon committee that is lobbying for the Barrow training facility. The Discovery TLC Channel and Fox News will offer extensive coverage of US Rowing training as part of Palin’s up-coming Alaska reality TV show. More detail in article below.
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So enjoy the Passover and Easter holidays, the conclusion of March Madness, the opening of the 2010 baseball season — Yankees v. Red Sox at Fenway Park (ESPN2) on Sunday; and get ready for some crew racing!
GO BLUE [Cambridge, Navy, Oxford and Yale]!
Cheers!
Best Regards,
Coach and TB406
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Dad Vail To Dubai in 2011
April 1, 2010
According to well-placed sources in Philadelphia City Hall, the Dad Vail Regatta may be headed to Dubai in May.
According to the source, after receiving a flurry of cryptically worded certified letters, Philadelphia officials immediately called a high-level meeting, where officials played game of Charades in order to figure out what was going on. “The full text of the first letter was “Whatsamatta U?!?”” so we immediately knew they meant business,” the source said.
“We got a check, and we hit Google Maps, and it looks like they have water, so we’re going,” said a Dad Vail official on condition of anonymity. “The map showed it looks a lot like the course in Rumson NJ, and that’s how we did that site review as well. But you can imagine the check from Dubai was bigger.” A lot bigger, it turns out, according to the City Hall source. “The second certified mail received came from Dubai, and it was just a picture of a bunch of guys in yellow jackets with a huge check that looked like it was from a game show.”
“Look, we are fair and open-minded,” said the Vails official. “All anyone needs if they really want to host the Dad Vail is our mailing address. We’ll cash the check and then decide where the race will be.”
Asked for comment on whether the regatta would actually take place, officials in Dubai responded that “we’ll find out just like everyone else does, from coaches to administrators to Dad Vail board members – by reading the Philadelphia Inquirer online.”
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Barrow, Alaska submits application for USRowing Training Camp
April 1, 2010
Following on the heels of the new Oklahoma City Training Center, Barrow, Alaska has submitted an application to USRowing for a new summer training center. The training center is planned for Emaiksoun Lake, less than a mile from downtown, and will feature a new boathouse and fully buoyed, six-lane 2000 meter race course.
Barrow Mayor Bobby Haracheck, also the chairman of the proposal to USRowing said, “One of the nice things about Oklahoma City, is that you can row at night under the lights. Well in Barrow, the sun does not set from mid-May to August 1, so the athletes will have the option to train on the water whenever they want.
“The climate during the summer is quite temperate, with average highs in the 50’s which is ideal for athletes in training. Barrow does not receive the oppressive heat and humidity that New Jersey gets during the summer.”
USRowing is expected to make a ruling on the proposal by mid-June of 2010.
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Mar 31, 2010
Yale Takes on Brown in Season Opener
NEW HAVEN, Conn.- Yale’s heavyweight crews open their season when Brown visits the Gilder Boathouse this Saturday. Five races will take place on the morning of Apr. 3, beginning at 10:30 a.m.
Last year’s encounter with Brown in Providence, R.I., left the Bulldogs empty-handed. The Bears swept all three races: varsity, second varsity and freshman. Yale will race Brown in five events this year: the varsity, second varsity, third varsity and freshman eights, as well as a four.
On the upcoming Brown race, Captain Lucas Spielfogel noted, “There’s no question Brown will be fast. However, history means nothing to us. We will look to beat them.”
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Apr 2, 2010
Busy Weekend For No. 1 Bulldogs
Yale Races Cornell, Syracuse, Michigan State, Buffalo Starting Friday
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The top-ranked Yale women’s crew will face a big test this weekend. The Bulldogs will race four times in two days, starting Friday against Cornell and Syracuse. The teams will be competing for the Cayuga Cup. On Saturday, Yale faces No. 7 Michigan State in the morning and the University of Buffalo in the afternoon. All four races will be on the Cayuga Lake Inlet in Ithaca, N.Y.
The Bulldogs opened the season with a sweep of Penn and Columbia last Saturday. Yale won all five races, each by at least six seconds. The varsity eight cruised to a nearly 11-second victory to retain the Connell Cup. In this week’s CRCA/US Rowing national poll, the Bulldogs remained first in the nation.
Saturday is the opening race of the spring season for Cornell, who scrimmaged Ithaca last weekend.
Syracuse captured the Kittell Cup in its opening race of the spring, defeating Boston University. Michigan State’s varsity eight was named the Big Ten Boat of the Week after defeating Michigan and Notre Dame last weekend. The Spartans finished sixth at last year’s NCAA Championships and are the two-time defending Big Ten champions. Buffalo received votes in this week’s national poll. The Bulls raced Notre Dame and Indiana last weekend.
Yale will be looking to capture the Cayuga Cup for the ninth straight year in the varsity eight race with Cornell and Syracuse. Last year, the Bulldogs won all five races, including cruising to an 11-second victory in the varsity eight.