Sculling: the inferior discipline?

Which is better, sculling or sweeping? It’s the age old question of our discipline. But is there something inherently better about sweep rowing or is the whole idea simply a conspiracy to undermine scullers?

Maybe it is a chicken or the egg type of question, where the answer lies in the history of the sport. The first recorded rowing race from Virgil’s account The Aeneiad took place in 800BC within the Greek fleet that were besieging Troy, and after that, there’s evidence of both Emperors Augustus and Claudius holding massive regattas during their reigns at the beginning of the first millennia. The boats of these ancient empires were all single-oared, because they were essentially battleships. Designed to accommodate all aspects of war, they were very wide to house the soldiers and equipment and had to be agile enough to cope with ancient battle strategy. The width then eliminated any possibility that these boats might have two oars per soldier, and regardless, they found that having two definitive sides of the boat made them much easier to manoeuvre. Taking the very earliest roots of the sport then, maybe sweep is today regarded more highly because that style of boat was the ‘founding father’ of the discipline.

This does seem a little bit far-fetched though, the idea that the design of Ancient Greek and Roman battleships has influenced modern perceptions quite so strongly. Going back instead to the oldest contemporary form of rowing, the reign of Henry VII saw races between Tudor ‘Pulls’ come into fashion. Again, these rowers only had one blade each, and this style of boat persisted through the next few centuries when the international races began to pop up, the first between the English Thames waterman and the New York rowers in 1825. As rowing as a discipline became more popular, Oxford and Cambridge Universities introduced boat clubs in 1822 and 1827 respectively, with the first Boat Race happening in 1829. Before long, Henley Royal was added to the calendar with its inaugural race just ten years later, and so the most prestigious rowing events in the world were dominated by sweep categories. 

This shows that the argument of looking at the highest level of racing seems to have some weight behind it, especially when you look at the history of the Olympic rowing events. First added to the programme in 1900, the only sculling event available then was the single. For sweep athletes, they could race in a coxed pair or four, a coxless pair or four or the biggest boat of the Games, the eight. Double sculls were added for a one-time outing in the 1904 edition but weren’t made a permanent entry until 1920, and the coxless quad didn’t make an appearance until 1976, coincidentally the same year women were allowed to compete. This shows a clear preference against sculling crews at a high international level, which undoubtedly contributes to the superiority of the sweeping discipline – to the untrained eye, surely if these are the most numerous events at the Olympics then they must be better than the sculling races?

Further boosting the reputation of sweep crews is the fact that most collegiate rowing across the world focuses on this discipline rather than sculling. This means that for many rowers, sweep is how they learn to row, and for many that don’t carry on this is all they will ever know…

But! the real kicker for out and out scullers goes deeper than this. It’s a known fact that rowers tend to hang around with other rowers, but these individuals that may have just dabbled in the sport during their student days are not as socially constrained. Because of this wider influence, most ‘normal’ people who hear about the ‘behind the scenes’ of rowing (and I use this phrase sparingly) gain all they know from these relatively peripheral individuals. Regrettably then for scullers, generally speaking these are the rowers that can’t get enough of talking about their glory days in the eight, honking down the river and ripping up ergs. Maybe if they’d stuck it out and branched out into sculling then they would have some different stories, but then they too would be stuck in the social spiral of the rower.

Maybe this is just my cynical sculling mindset talking, but it does make sense as to why the general perception is that sweep is better than sculling. When you ask rowers, 9 times out of 10 they’ll tell you that sculling is more technically challenging, so why is it still viewed as inferior? I do think that it is a combination of all these things we’ve discussed. The deep history dive shows that single-oar boats were the original design, taken into the modern conception of the sport, and so it makes sense that they were the more common events at the early regattas. Further, as with many sports, the primary focus today is on the biggest and fastest event, which for rowing is the eights. This leads inescapably to the perception that sweep boats are faster (even though they aren’t), and that generally sweep events are more advanced. There is no tangible reason why sculling should be inferior, but the simple fact that sweep is displayed more often in international events and the fact that it is far less common to switch from sweep to sculling (…because it is harder) means that pure rowers gain the reputation of being somehow better than their sculling counterparts.

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Amelie Sartain

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