This year’s World Championships generated much excitement by the sound of it, and the actual racing was not the main topic of discussion. Instead, it was the wind.
By all accounts, the wind in Cologne was abysmal. It was hard. It swirled. And it generally made the course unfair.
There are very few race course which will be fair under all conditions. The organizers in Cologne cannot be blamed for wind conditions which were worse than expected. We have seen some pretty odd winds ourselves during the last two collegiate racing seasons in the eastern United States. Even highly-regarded courses such as the Occoquan in Fairfax, Virginia, have failed to remain immune.
Certainly, when I was an undergraduate racing on the Charles River in Boston, I remember two occasions when we had to shift our generally-reliable racecourse to another part of the river because of rough conditions, and I certainly remember one race when we did race on the course and barely finished. On a visit to the Naval Academy one year, we had to use a makeshift and unmarked course. On other courses, I remember non-ideal conditions - fair only in the sense that everyone had it equally as bad - quite often. At our collegiate championship regatta held on Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, Mass. (also the site of my schoolboy championships), we regularly wondered about windy conditions, although I only remember one set of races affected during my years competing there. This is Division One US racing, and it is something the top programs here simply have to deal with. The lower-division programs are usually more prone to these issues. Certainly, those programs fortunate enough to train on sheltered water all the time get slaughtered as soon as they have to race somewhere with normal conditions. Yes, indeed, weather is normal.
But what is surprising is that FISA does have some input into the conditions. There are only so many courses in the world, and they are not all convenient for most peoples’ uses. I am afraid that Britain will have to put up with the National Watersports Centre in Nottingham as the site for its important championships, despite the fact that so many events regularly get canceled due to sinking conditions. Yet FISA has a world full of locations to choose from. With so much variety, I am surprised they ever turn to courses like Cologne (or indeed Nottingham - a course built to hold the World Championships which was specifically designed to pick up maximum wind so it could later be used as a sailing venue, not to mention for other uses such as waterskiing, canoing, and kayaking).
Cologne, like Nottingham, has a giant swimming pool for a rowing course. It conforms to minimum FISA standards (eight lanes wide, 2500 meters long). But that is it. These man-made pools are rarely suited for such races - because if a wind comes there is not much anyone can do about it.
Lake Carnegie in Princeton, New Jersey, is man-made, but from a different era. To the unknowing observer, it might as well be natural. The anecdote goes something like this: when Woodrow Wilson was President of Princeton University, he decided Princeton needed a law school to rival all the other top US Universities. He canvassed the main philanthropists of the day to finance the project, including Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie told Wilson that Princeton did not need a law school, it needed a rowing program. So he built a large lake alongside campus with a boathouse in a cove. Carnegie, of course, was right. Even today, Princeton has no law school but does have a highly successful rowing program.
These days, man-made pools tend to fail, which is why I am so surprised FISA agreed to hold the Worlds in Cologne. The site is apparently known for its wild winds, even if they do not normally occur at this time of year. It does not seem to be a risk worth taking when there are plenty of good venues out there.
Weather can be a factor anywhere - even on one of the good venues - but why hold championships in a place where it is likely to be a factor? If the championships concerned are national or regional in scope, there’s not much anyone can do: Lake Quinsigamond is likely to be the venue for its championship races for many years to come for lack of a good alternative (and Good old Quinsig, of which I have many fond memories, is generally fine). Nottingham will hold its place in Britain (even the new rowing course going in at Eton will be artificial and pool-like, although the wind factor remains to be seen). But World Championships have a whole world of sites to choose from.
Probably the nicest site I have ever seen is the Estany de Banyoles. "Estany," incidentally, is a bizarre Catalan word with no real translation (it is a specific rare type of lake fed naturally by underground springs). Banyoles hosted the 1992 Olympic Rowing Championships and the Junior Worlds the year before. I have seen it on windy days with barely more than a ripple. It is wide, with ample warm-up area, and protected on all sides by Pyrenean foothills.
Others may have other nominees for favorite rowing venues. But the point is that there are enough of them to go around.
I take nothing away from the winners of this year’s Worlds. Indeed, I have no reason to believe that the results would have worked out any differently if the conditions had been nicer. But it seems a shame to hold a championship race of this magnitude on an obviously imperfect course when better alternatives not only exist but would also be practical.
Other groups should take note. I refer specifically, of course, to the Dad Vail (US Div III Collegiate) National Championship Regatta, which is held on one of the most atrocious racecourse I have ever seen used for championship racing - the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia (not usually as rough as Nottingham - where boats regularly sink, but terrible in its own ways).
This is 1998. We can’t help all racecourses, and we can’t make it practical for every race to be on a good course (we have a beautiful home course here in Williamsburg, but if any wind comes out of the southwest it becomes unrowable). But we can do something about the location of championship races to find courses which are more likely to be fair and rowable.