RowingRelated

Weekend of racing in Amsterdam (Photo courtesy Heineken Roeivierkamp/Facebook ) Press Release: Olympic rowers competing on the Amstel River. The Heineken Roeivierkamp rowing regatta takes place for the 45th time on March 11th and 12th 2017. With 3,500 participants from all over the world and 10,000 spectators, the Heineken regatta is the largest rowing regatta of the Netherlands. It is the traditional start of the Dutch rowing season where the elite crews will compete against each other for the first time of the year.

In light of our recent opinion piece on the chatter surrounding USRowing in the wake of Rio's results, there has been a lot of back-and-forth about what 'coaching' means, and about how that relates to the athletes, and the wider culture of a team. While our position in the opinion piece was founded on the idea that the athletes were 'bought in' and executing the program as laid out by the coaches to the best of their abilities, U.S. national team veteran Mike Gennaro believes that some doubts crept in along the way, creating cracks in the team-wide trust that later became rifts.

UW rowing through the Montlake Cut (Photo: RR) Press Release: Washington Rowing, along with Windermere Real Estate, welcomes the Shanghai men's and women's High-Performance Rowing teams from China as the headlining opponent for the 31st annual Windermere Cup, scheduled for Saturday, May 6, 2017.

First strokes, IRA Championships (Photo: RR) There has been a firestorm around USRowing recently, with top-level changes, the removal of the CEO and the High Performance Director, and a renewed approach to structuring the board and the High Performance Committee. Social media and the discussion boards have been overwhelmed with theories about how and why things went wrong, and Carlo Zezza even went so far as to write a 74-page book entitled The Boys in a Box  about all of the above. We've heard theories about too many international rowers, about divided priorities, about sculling being the one, true way to revitalize U.S. athletes on the international rowing stage. But we're pretty sure it's a whole lot simpler than all of that.

A look inside Issue No. 2 of SportUp's Between The Lines magazine A lot has changed since 2010. It's fair to say that the Internet is a different place—the landscape of social media 'disrupted' blogging, just as blogging had disrupted publishing. The sport of rowing has grown online, too. Strange but true: RowingRelated and Instagram got started within days of each other, in October 2010. Since then, I think it's fair to say we've had similar levels of success. (Ha.) But seriously, Instagram, and other social networks, have changed the way we consume media. (You don't need to look any further than  analysis of the U.S. presidential election to find evidence of that.) It has also changed the way that publishers, writers, and artists communicate with their audiences. Which brings me to my main point: This isn't goodbye, and we never left. I referenced Instagram earlier—the network's meteoric rise to prominence carried a lot of people with it. ...

Looking back on Rio Hard as it may be to believe, the Rio Olympics are now done and dusted. Four years of preparation, four years of early mornings, four years of squeezing in an extra session on your ‘off’ day to help pave the way to the podium. It either worked, or it didn’t. One thing is certain — we’re all better for it. But Rio, in many ways, was a dichotomy—in other words, it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. Here’s what I mean.

PBS' American Experience documentary, The Boys of '36 airs August 2nd (Screen capture) Tomorrow marks the airing of the PBS documentary, The Boys of '36 , based on the epic story of Washington's underdogs (okay, underdawgs) who took on the world, and won, at the Olympic Games in Berlin. And, just to get you fully prepared, here are three videos—the first one a look at the first chapter of the documentary; the second, a look at what the current Washington athletes felt about their role reenacting some of the scenes from 1936; and finally, an interview with the filmmakers. If you've not yet read Daniel James Brown's book, The Boys in the Boat , then this ought to make it damn near impossible not to pick it up. The story of Joe Rantz and his crew is, in many ways, the ultimate American story, capturing both the essence of the time and of the American people, working their way through the Great Depression. While there's a great deal of continuity ...

Last week, we published this story on the potential issue of doping in rowing . Rather amazingly, since then, we've seen Italian 2012 Olympian Niccolo Mornati receive a four-year ban on doping charges, and now the below, from FISA earlier today .