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whlinder
Member Posts: 4,882 
https://rowingrelated.substack.com/p/the-future-of-rowing-at-the-olympics
This was a chintriguing POV. I still think the sport will suffer because it is so unrelatable to people. Most of us have run or swam, but few people have ever been in a shell.
This was a chintriguing POV. I still think the sport will suffer because it is so unrelatable to people. Most of us have run or swam, but few people have ever been in a shell.
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Rowing's problem is in large part that it's not a good spectator sport. Swimmers go back and forth in a 50m pool, and a crowd can sit around them in a stadium and watch from start to finish. Same with track&field. A rowing course stretches 2000m, straight, so you can either sit and watch the beginning, watch the middle somewhere, or watch the finish, but you can't do all three. Cycling has pretty much the same problem - you can't see anything but a small bit of the race. Swimming and T&F are also easier to televise, since you can have static cameras from several vantage points and be able to cover everything. Not so with crew or cycling; look at how much effort goes into covering the Tour de France, and crew almost requires a moving camera to watch the noses of the lead boats.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few different distances in Olympic rowing, though. 5k or 10k, maybe a shorter sprint. But the longer distances would be incredibly difficult to put on, since you need a decent course that's relatively straight and calm, and the spectator issues would be even worse.
We need to put the rowing train back on the Burke Gillman trail. Cool footage here of UW vs Cal in Seattle in 1936, back when the race was 4 miles long on Lake Worshington.