Rowing is a genetic lottery.
It always has been that the taller you are and the heavier you are, the larger benefit you get in the openweight category.
However, lightweight rowing is also a lifeline to countries in which winning the height genetic lottery is a lot less common.
In the second part of my series exploring the effects of removal of lightweight rowing from the Olympics, I’m looking at the impact it has outside of the Western World.
I spoke to Joseph Donnelly, National Rowing Coach at Vietnam Rowing.
The lightweight rowing programme in Vietnam is one of very few sports programmes that qualifies for the Olympics for Vietnam, having sent a lightweight women’s double over the past three Olympiads.
Despite having a population of almost 100 million people, Vietnam only sent 18 athletes to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, compared to 376 athletes from Great Britain, which has a population of 67 million. And, Vietnam has only won one Gold medal to date at the Olympics, in the 2016 Rio Olympics in the Men’s 10m Pistol.
Lightweight rowing is a lifeline to a nation which sends so few athletes to the Olympics.
Joseph Donnelly started his rowing career in 1964 at Riverview College, working his way up to coxing the Australian Eight at the 1974 and 1975 World Championships.
After rowing, he became an accountant at Kinross Wolaroi School (KWS), where he was Chief Financial Officer for 32 years. During his time at KWS, he set up their rowing programme in 2000. The aim was to help make it the best school in Australia. And, to be the best, you had to beat the best in sport. The only sport open for them to compete in nationals was rowing.
“So from scratch in 2004, I got the money to build the shed, got the boats donated and taught the kids to row, and I told them I would do it for nothing, which I did, just from a normal salary to show them it can be done,” Donnelly said.
By 2010, KWS was the top school in Australia, winning the National Championships in rowing.
But in those six years, Donnelly was also getting involved in a new level of rowing – the Vietnamese National Team.
From 2004, he’d been going to Vietnam on holiday each year, spending more and more time there. During his 2009 trip, he saw a sign that said “rowing”. And the next time he went to Vietnam, he went down to Hồ Tây Lake to meet Miss Lan, and Mr Hu, who ran the amateur rowing club.
For the five days of his holiday, Donnelly coached the National Team every day. And, at the end of the week, he was asked to help with the upcoming Guangzhou Asian Games.
So, he wrote programs for them and flew out to Vietnam a few times, all while paying his expenses out of pocket. His efforts led to them earning silver in two events, the Women’s Double and the Lightweight Women’s Quad.
Donnelly left school rowing behind him to coach Vietnam more full-time, taking a large pay cut in the process.
At the Asian Continental Regatta, the Lightweight Women’s Double took the final qualification spot in the final, coming 3rd, and requiring the top three to qualify.
Donnelly’s coaching has led to Vietnam qualifying for the past three Olympics in the Lightweight Double and they are hopeful for qualifications at the upcoming regional qualifiers.
Joseph has put huge amounts of time and money into the national team. And from 2014, he left his accounting job behind him to focus solely on coaching Vietnam splitting his time between Australia and Vietnam.
He also donated an 8+ to the programme, combining his own savings with fundraising efforts. The eight has only been trained over the past year, with Vietnam renting an eight in China for the Asian Games, winning bronze.
This upcoming Olympic qualifier is the final chance for Vietnam to qualify for the Olympics.
Donnelly said: “All my athletes except for two, one girl and one boy, are lightweight. They’re all lightweights”.
With fewer lightweight events being run, they are racing in openweight events.
He said: “We have to enter openweight events, and it’s nearly impossible to win.
“In the pictures, you can look at the size difference between the athletes that beat us at the 2022 Asian Games.”
Donnelly continued: “We can never win internationally because of the size of the people. No matter how well I teach them to row, they just don’t have enough power. The cox in the eight weighed more than two of my rowers”.
The lightweight category means so much to a programme that has very few athletes that can even break the lightweight weight limit.
So how was the decision made to cut lightweight rowing from the Olympics, given its huge impact on non-Western nations?
World Rowing.
That’s who Donnelly blames.
“It’s the World Rowing Body, formerly the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Aviron (FISA). That’s the problem I think and the guy that’s the head of FISA, Jean Christopher Rolland,” he said.
“It’s political. It’s political. FISA say it’s the Olympics doing the culling, but rowing doesn’t have to follow the Olympics. If the Olympics wants to cut lightweight rowing, okay, let ’em cut it. But World Rowing at every world rowing event should have Lightweight Women’s Quad, Lightweight Men’s, Lightweight Four, Lightweight Double, because they talk about universality.”
Many of these events haven’t been run at past World Cups due to no nations signing up to participate in them.
The coach continued: “They talk about universality. If you take China out, all the other people are lightweight, pretty well. Not just Vietnam, but the other countries as well – Hong Kong, Indonesia.
“The women aren’t big. And the men aren’t big. They’re never going to compete with Australian rowers that get beefsteak for lunch and breakfast and milk and all of that sort of food. Here they get a bowl of Phở, a bit of noodle. You know, you cannot make up the power and the strength that a Western rower has versus an Asian rower.”
“World Rowing doesn’t really care. But they should realise that if they don’t have the Asian countries, they’ll have no one to race. So they need to get their act together and put the lightweight rowing back in. I’ll be dead before it happens, but that’s the truth of the matter. The world doesn’t give a damn about Vietnam.”
It is also important to acknowledge the fact that Western Nations do compete in lightweight rowing.
As Joseph says himself: “Lots of countries support lightweight rowing. Western countries like Norway, Sweden, Australia does.”
All the A-finalists for the LM2x at this year’s 2023 World Championships were European Countries. However, the support for lightweight rowing from the Western World isn’t strong enough.
And Donnelly isn’t optimistic about the introduction of beach sprints in place of lightweight rowing.
“It’s a completely different sport. They may as well call it hockey, or football. It’s a different sport. It shouldn’t be run, I don’t think it should be under the auspice of FISA. FISA should look after rowing like it has for the last 100 years,” he said.
When asked about a potential transition to coastal rowing for Vietnam, he said: “I think it’s a waste of time, I wouldn’t even think about it.“
World Rowing did not respond to a request for comment.
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