During my time on a women’s heavyweight rowing college program, I have become acutely aware of the varying discourse that exists between the women’s and men’s teams, with both sides fielding heavyweight and lightweight crews. Rowing has always been male dominated. In spite of a modern-day female lead to redress the balance, where 75.7% of collegiate athletes are women, I feel continually challenged by certain expectations and biases which naturally exist in the rowing community. Such biases have subsequently moulded my experience as an athlete.
As a junior, I was pressured to lose weight beyond a healthy range, by my male coach – a disappointingly common narrative amongst young women. While I am now recovered, I cannot begin to imagine the stresses which would come with maintaining lightweight status, nor how this would change as young bodies grow. I believe there are certain power dynamics and masculine-focused discourses which have become the ‘norm’ in rowing and have, unfortunately, informed these harmful behaviour patterns.
To contextualise this some more, if we take the historic (and ongoing) intersection between rowing and academia, we can see the beginnings of male-dominated discourse. The modern sport originates from the River Thames, England, where male students from Oxford and Cambridge university attempted to mimic the shipmen at work in London by racing one another, thus commencing the historical tradition of the ‘Boat Race’ from 1829. Across the pond, collegiately, ‘Men’s Crew’ was the first sport contested in the United States, mirroring its transatlantic counterparts, in the Harvard v Yale duel of 1852. As such, women remained excluded from both higher educational academia and rowing until the early 1900s; Oxford and Cambridge did not grant women degrees until 1920 and 1947 respectively, while Georgetown, Princeton and Harvard University in the USA only became co-educational in the latter half of the 20th century.
Therefore, the modern sport of rowing exists under the intellectual conditions that are still likely to perpetuate masculine biases, because that is what tradition has demanded.
Another dynamic that contextualises – but does not justify – a masculine discourse around rowing is event ‘difficulty’. For instance, the first Women’s Boat Race was held in 1935 on a course 4,688m shorter than the men’s – something that was not made equal until as recently as 2015. It is therefore evident that the masculine biases within the aforementioned academic institutions deemed that firstly, women were not able to compete at the same intensity as men, and secondly, that women’s rowing did not deserve equal treatment in practice, so is, by proxy, inferior.
With all this in mind, it becomes clearer to see how a historically masculine discourse – despite the community’s best efforts to redress the balance – can translate into ongoing toxic behaviours when it comes to weight.
I have heard the classic comment “they wouldn’t make basketball for short people” countless times, but I do believe rowing needs to be different to some extent. The roots of weight categorisation are not entirely known, though World Rowing deemed the decision was made because it became obvious that rowers of a larger stature continually had a competitive advantage. Nevertheless, this risks alienating an entire community of athletes, particularly at the junior level, who do not fall exactly within the ‘biological advantages’ of the published standards.
Of course, there is lightweight rowing for the athletes who stray from the ‘traditional’ rowing archetype, but I believe this only further perpetuates the toxic mentality that many junior and senior athletes will face when it comes to their weight and body image. It is important to note that lightweight rowing culture is most prevalent in the United States and seldom exists beyond with the exception of elite level practice. This is because the United States simply has a greater number of athletes where inclusivity can remain the motivation for weight categorisation, with 21 colleges offering lightweight programs. However, lightweight rowing raises the complex but important question of how to draw the line in terms of weight parameters, or if there should even be a line at all.
It was not until 2021 where junior weight categorisation was prohibited. We have four members of our college team who started on the lightweight program after successful youth careers but outgrew the restrictions quite literally as they grew up. Speaking with one teammate, she recounted how in order to make weight she put herself “on a liquid diet until dinner, but [she] would get so tired, [she] also noticed not having as much energy for training and struggled to overcome sickness.”
The lightweights who raced in the recent Paris Olympic games will be ‘Olympic Champions Forever’ due to the removal of lightweight competition from the games in Los-Angeles 2028. Assumedly, this will prompt a trickle-down effect for the removal of lightweight rowing in other international and domestic racing over the coming years. However, it should be noted that this decision is actually quite overdue. In 2009, the International Olympic Committee released a statement advising against weight categorisation beyond combat sports. With the future of lightweight rowing hanging in the balance, I am both surprised this decision was made now and intrigued as to the direction lightweight athletes will take.
Emily Craig and Imogen Grant, Olympic gold medallists in the women’s lightweight double scull, have already announced they will be pursuing the new Beach Sprints event, which will hopefully negate the need for a wider build and longer levers to achieve optimal speed. But for a sport so loyal to tradition, this new direction will take some adjustment.
The encouragement to lose weight, specifically for young female athletes, opposes what is healthy and is an effect of the ongoing male-leaning power dynamics in the sport of rowing. The existence of weight categorisation below international competition paves the road to mental and physical wellbeing issues later in life. I acknowledge that this is not the case for all lightweight athletes, some are indeed petite enough to meet these restrictions without concern, but in most cases, the obsession around weight loss can only lead to an unhealthy outlook on weight that can be damaging throughout an athlete’s life, all because of discourse like “they wouldn’t make basketball for short people”. With the future of lightweight rowing in the grey, I suggest there should be proper resources accessible to assist with maintaining weight, but this should exist entirely beyond the junior age-groups. Until the traditionalist attitudes can be upturned, young female rowers will inevitably be impacted by the same behaviour, like in many other sports.
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