World Rowing Records: When the Stars Align

World rowing records astonish us by stretching our conception of human potential. But in rowing, they are freak occurrences that happen only when there’s a confluence of favorable conditions.

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World-best times fascinate us. They signify a performance that no one has ever achieved before and that is unattainable by 99.9 percent of ordinary rowers. They are special also because, once set, they get only better.

What can we learn from them? Not much (except that they’re amazing and inspire us to wonder about who accomplishes such feats). The reason is that they are so random. In fact, all the stars have to align: You need an outstanding team that is either challenged to perform at its best or in the mood to go crazy. And you need an internationally recognized event in the right place.

Record performances are recognized only on courses sanctioned by World Rowing, and of these, world-best times have been set at only a few: Amsterdam in The Netherlands, Lucerne in Switzerland, Poznan in Poland, and Eton in the United Kingdom.

There are other places that offer the right conditions for fast times but for one reason or another they’re not on the international race list. The Olympic courses in Athens and Tokyo come to mind, and Indianapolis has a regatta course where best times were once set but that is no longer used for international competition.

Although courses in Munich and Bled (Slovenia) often host international events, they cannot boast world-best times since the right conditions are needed for fast runs. Warm water and air temperatures are crucial, but above all the wind must blow intensively from the right direction at exactly the right speed for exactly the right duration and without piling up too many waves.

If the wind speed or waves are too high, rowing is impeded rather than accelerated, or races will be postponed for safety reasons. The ideal: an increasing straight tailwind lasting long enough to move the water into a small current toward the finish line and then a big gust for the length of the race that delivers a push before there’s time to create big waves.

Because such favorable conditions combine only briefly, world-best times are set in individual races and not during the entire regatta. And because such conditions occur haphazardly, world-best times are achieved often in preliminary rounds, such as the record rows of both U.S. Olympic eights as well as the Kiwi pair in their heats at the Athens and London Games, respectively, or the Sincovic brothers in their semifinal of the 2014 world championships in Amsterdam. These teams probably didn’t race at top speed in those races, which means they could have set even higher marks if they’d been pushed to the limit under the same conditions in their finals.

The random nature of world-best times is illustrated by the longest-standing record in any current Olympic boat class. Rumyana Neykova of Bulgaria rowed the fastest time ever in the women’s single sculls in 2002, and no woman has come close in the years since. Neykova hit the jackpot of favorable circumstances when she flew over the course in Seville.

World-best times have been set by rowers who were not the best in their boat class that year. New Zealander Robbie Manson, for example, set a world record in the single sculls at the 2017 World Rowing Cup but finished only fifth at the world championships a few weeks later. Could the world champion have achieved an even better time?

The bottom line: World-best times should be taken with a boulder-size grain of salt. Although they improve with each new record and indicate how fast a team can row in a particular boat class, they’re not suitable for a longitudinal analysis of how the sport of rowing is developing or for national standards to compare different boat classes.

Considering all the advances in boats, oars, and equipment, the improvements in training and physiological and biomechanical science, and the increased athlete support that all national teams bring to international regattas, you’d expect more frequent and more significant world-best times in recent years.

Looking at world-best times, one gets the impression that rowing is getting faster. This is not the case. An in-depth analysis of world championships and Olympic finals undertaken with my friend and colleague Valery Kleshnev shows that since 2007 the performances of world-best crews have stagnated, even declined.

Using data from all boat classes every year paints a more reliable picture and should be used to set national and international standards for training and selection.                                     Volker Nolte

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