I was sculling alone on the river just before dawn — the passing lights of the city dancing in my wake. I had just returned from the 1993 Australian National Championships as a lightweight sculler and had a week unscheduled in my training program. I set out with my usual squared blades warm-up exercises, half-slide, three-quarter, breathing rhythmically; light catch and drawing through. Tap down. Pause. In the silence of the morning, the flowing waters under my hull were amplified, making my boat speed incalculable in the dark. Moving to full slide with feathered blades, my oars found that point of natural balance in perfect harmony and my boat surged, rising from the water surface. The lights of the Gladesville bridge sparking below me, and starlight surrounded me. The puddles from my strokes were swirling in spiral galaxies, fading away, and the trail of my boat stretches out through the phosphorescence. I was flying in weightless space.
Without warning, there is a sudden thud of metal colliding with dense wood. My warm body becomes enveloped in black, cold saltwater. Muffled gurgling sounds are pressuring my eardrums.
At the very moment when I had ascended to a higher experiential rowing dimension, I had hit an old wooden pylon with my bow-side rigger. I was hurled out of my single scull into the deathly waters of the Parramatta River. Herein lies the paradoxical complexity of our sport: although we are pursuing an idealistic state of perfect motion, we are constrained by the unyielding realities of the physical world. Although I can now float on the surface of a magical fluid separating the earth from the heavens, I am propelled only by my athletic capabilities and the design of my equipment. My boat and my oars are the only means by which I am transformed from a drowning man into an oarsman.
My enthusiasm for rowing oar design began watching the Barcelona Olympics on a small analogue tv set in my dorm room. I looked with amazement at images of a new ‘cleaver’ blade and the Australian “Oarsome Foursome” adopting it for the first time. I had learned to row with wooden oars as a young boy, then in high school, I had carbon fibre Macons, and soon I was to have my own pair of ‘cleaver’ blades purchased by my university. The transition from Macon blades to the new ‘big blade’ was like being born into a new reality of rowing. Having only ever rowed with Macons, nothing could prepare you for the feeling of the new blade design. You could feel the extra weight at the catch as if the water had turned into a solid. Rowers and coaches were grappling with this new feeling, new speeds, experimenting with unique outboard measurements, changing blade pitch, height, span and bending pins with long pieces of discarded plumbing.
The Spirit of change and innovation was blowing throughout the rowing world in the ’90s, and the lightest slender honeycomb composite soon replaced my old fibreglass single. By 2000 I was watching the Sydney Olympics as an art and design teacher with a young family. I had left rowing long ago and was well above the maximum 72.5 kgs. When we age, we yearn for our youth and question the decisions once made. What if I had continued with my rowing and had not stopped when I did? Yet, I dare not regret my life decisions from the comfort of my armchair surrounded by my family. It wouldn’t be for another decade that I returned to the water as a Masters rower, now twenty years after the excitement of Barcelona. At the boatshed, I noticed that novices were now all rowing, dropping, dragging the once precious cleaver oars, and fibreglass was nowhere to be seen. There was now a new normal. Same-same. Cleaver blades and carbon fibre boats, but everything felt old, especially me.
Yet it was reminiscing about 90’s innovation and dreaming of rowing into weightless space that I thought about my oars. The Sinkovic brothers were all over YouTube, and we were talking around the boathouse about their sculling perfection with impossible blade placement and synchronicity. I wondered if an oar could be designed to be rowed automatically like the Sinkovic’s, just sitting at that perfect height in the water, without dragging the oar shaft through the water? Could ten thousand hours of technique dills be exchanged for a new design?
Firstly, was it actually possible for me to row like the Sinkovic brothers with only the blade in the water and not the shaft? My oars were well-pitched, so I could get this working “theoretically”, but as soon as it was time to put in some work, the natural design of the oar took over and down it plunged. Watching rowers from elite to beginners, we all row to some extent by dragging the oar shaft through the water, some up to 50%. No amount of white indicator tape on our shafts seem to make any difference. Surely, whenever the water touches the shaft, it would affect my speed. Next, I considered how you could mechanically stop the blade from being buried beyond the surface of the water. The blade would need some kind of ‘stopper’ or perhaps a float, but this would interfere with the feathering action. I found a set of oars that had been sitting there for years with a “to be repaired” sign on them. With some fibreglass, I placed a 90-degree edge to the top of the blade, a kind of hydrofoil.
The effect was immediate and obvious – the foil held the blade at the surface as I rowed, even when I pulled hard. My stroke coach reported that I was moving much faster than usual and with a lower heart rate. Although the feeling of the foil was so very different, the whole experience was strangely familiar. It was like when I rowed with cleavers for the first time – the ‘grip’ the foil created seemed even more potent.
This was the beginning of my journey to develop the Randall foil. In the coming months, I wish to share with you my love of rowing and some of the many pylons that I’ve hit.s
This article was written by Ian Randall. To find out more about his work and story, head over to our content partners page, or read more of his work here.
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