Yes, indeed, there is no rowing in Kosovo. I have found a nice lake not too far from Pristina which looks fantastic for training. It is big enough, and is protected on all sides by mountains. This is not exactly the country which has an abundance of 250hp speedboats, either, so the fishermen are more likely to be the ones who wade in from the bank. The lake is twenty minutes outside the capital on the main road to Gjilan (in the American sector).
There are some drawbacks, however. There are no boats, and no boathouse. As soon as we might procure such things, we'd also need to hire 24-hour armed security, since things have a way of disappearing around here. Also, this road along the lake is one of those narrow mountain roads with no guardrails, and unlit at night (fun driving!). This, in addition to the icy winters, makes this not a promising place right now. But maybe someday. Kosovo may have other important things to worry about at the moment.
I think back ten years to the 1992 Olympics. That was a time for new countries (and before qualifying regattas, or the equivalent in most other sports) - every internationally-recognized country at the time showed up with a team (in general, not in rowing), with the exception of Afghanistan. This was a big push by Barcelona, where the Catalans wanted to see how many newly-independent countries they could get (Catalonia was not among them).
I was in Banyoles, and remember observing some of this. There were some curious stories that emerged. These may be a little embellished after ten years (with some of the info being hearsay anyway), but they are still fun.
Slovenia and Croatia sent rowers, and their teams did quite well considering the war that had broken out. Slovenia was spared most of the violence, since there are no Serbs in Slovenia. But Croatia was a sad mess. The Croatian rowers told me how the Serb army was going around blowing up rowing clubs. Why rowing clubs? Because Croatia has a strong rowing tradition and success in international sporting competition brings fame and recognition to a country. They wanted to deprive Croatia of this opportunity to present itself on the world stage.
As a result of the war, there were international sanctions against the Yugoslav state. For Barcelona, the IOC really did want to try to get everyone in, so there were negotiations on how to get Yugoslavia there despite the sanctions. After all, now that South Africa was back in international competition, and lots of new countries had sprung up in the previous year, it was time to have everyone. Even Afghanistan had promised to send a team (although some local feuds kept the plane from leaving Kabul, and so the Afghanis never made it).
The negotiations over Yugoslavia went on for a while, and the games were about to start. At the last moment, a solution was reached: Yugoslavia could not come as a country, but Yugoslavs could come as individuals. This ruled out team sports, but allowed Yugoslav individuals to compete.
Now comes the weird part. Yugoslavia did not send a single sculler to Banyoles, but decided to send a straight pair. No one could quite figure out how a pair was an individual sport - a pair was a team! But, the argument came, they each row on different sides, and port is completely different from starboard. But, the response went, a basketball team has five different positions but is not five individuals but one team. The retort was two-fold: first, a basketball team has two guards and two forwards, so there is duplication; second, a basketball team has substitutes, which makes it a team sport, whereas rowing does not. Somehow this argument worked, and Yugoslavia's men's 2- was allowed in.
Or, it was allowed in theory. A special flight was arranged (since the international boycott meant that there were no regular flights out of Belgrade). But when the 2- arrived to get on the place, there were almost twenty people in the traveling party. The Yugoslav Rowing Federation claimed these were the personal coaches and trainers, plus translators, but the international staff checking credentials noticed that they were sneaking a few too many dubious characters onto the flight. So the 2- stayed behind. Intending to compete, they drove (no money meant no better transport solution, once they missed the one flight for the athletes; plus the trip was made longer by their passports and lack of paperwork). They pulled into Banyoles the morning of their heat, and quickly borrowed a boat from a local club, grabbed two oars from the Dreissigackers, bought two plain white t-shirts, and hit the water.
Their performance was miserable, but they were there. I did an interview with them, using a member of the Croatian squad as my interpreter. The Croatian had competed at Worlds the year before with one of them as part of the Yugoslav team, and they were good friends. Made the whole war look as senseless as it was.
Meanwhile, the former Soviet countries were also left a little disorganized when their country disintegrated that year. Most of the Soviet athletes were loyal to the former power (and, in team sports, had continued training together), so they got permission from the IOC to compete under the name "Unified Team" with white as their official color, and with the Olympic Rings flag, should they win medals. In individual events, their country's anthem would play if they won gold, otherwise for team sports they were to have the Olympic anthem.
So the Soviets (or former Soviets) showed up in Banyoles, quintessential members of the Soviet sports system. This was the year hatchet blades were introduced, and FISA threatened to ban them - until the Dreissigackers agreed to a compromise: any team which showed up at the Olympics and could not afford hatchets would get them on loan for free. The Soviets had no money during the break-up of their former country, so they picked up their brand new oars upon arrival. They then had to paint them. So they sent a representative to the FISA office and asked if they could go ahead and paint their blades red. Of course, said FISA, and off they went to start painting their blades immediately.
Soon thereafter, I was heading to see the FISA officials, and I passed the ex-Soviets painting their blades red. I asked FISA about this, and got quizzical faces: the Soviets are red, are they not? However, the compromise on the "Unified Team" had been a big effort by the IOC, which normally would have forced the athletes to break up into their separate countries. The color white was apparently a critical part of the compromise. So the blades had to be white. Oops.
I think FISA ultimately explained this one to the IOC by saying that the purpose of blade colors was easy identification for the umpires on safety grounds. Since the Soviets had always been red, that was the color the umpires would recognize, whereas white would cause too much of a delayed reaction which would, in turn, delay necessary warnings and could therefore cause accidents. The IOC bought this explanation, and the Soviets got to race one last time with their beloved red blades. They didn't win anything, though (nice new oars, a shame they had no training budget or money to repair their equipment).
Another one of my favorite Eastern European rowing stories also took place in Banyoles, at the 1991 Junior World Championships. I was working as the media liaison, doing official interviews and gathering all non-statistical information. This included interviewing the gold medallists in each event, which for event after event after event were the Germans. The Germans were winning so many things that my boss got sick of it and told me to stop interviewing Germans. Then, the Bulgarian girl's 1X surprised people by winning her event (today she is the reining world champion at the senior level, having won in both 2001 and 2002 after losing by the smallest margin I have ever seen in 2000). Since she wasn't German, my boss radioed me with explicit instructions that I was to interview her. So off I went to the Bulgarian tent.
When I got there, I realized right away that we had a problem. She spoke Bulgarian. I spoke only English, Spanish, Catalan, and German at that time. The Bulgarian delegation had an official translator with them, but they had sent her into town to buy champagne for the celebration. So I radioed my boss to explain the problem, and he instructed me to stay there until I got an interview - a non-German gold medallist was big news, and we needed to get the interview out. One coach spoke about a dozen words of English, and another spoke maybe two dozen words of German, so at least we communicated who I was and what I wanted, but getting anywhere with a proper interview was impossible. Celebrating, on the other hand, was possible.
Out came the picnic boxes. The first thing they produced, of course, were the bottles of alcohol. The labels were in Bulgarian, and Cyrillic script at that, so I did not get much in the way of details. But the labels did include a caption in English: "FINEST BULGARIAN WHISKEY." Now, I do not like whiskey normally (maybe an 18-year-old Macallan now and then), and "Finest Bulgarian Whiskey" is certainly not my taste. But it was impolite to refuse, so down it went. Then came the next glass, and the next. We killed one bottle and moved onto the next. In the way of food, they had some old sausages, which we ravenously devoured (it being now about 1:30 in the afternoon and breakfast was around 6:00). The interview was getting no easier. My boss kept radioing me for an update, and I kept reporting that the translator still wasn't there.
Finally, the translator arrived, and we could start. But the arrival of the translator also meant the arrival of the champagne, so the corks popped and we had some more rounds. The very generous Bulgarians would not accept my pleas that I had had enough for an empty stomach. Eventually, I got the interview done and stumbled onto my bike to return to the press tent with the transcript. We got the interview plugged into the system, and my boss decided we needed to get a big meal (no drinks) before we wrapped up.