This may seem like the idle dreams of men in the twilight of their years, yet this campaign is quickly becoming an exciting youth movement. This article is about the movement to overturn the 1983 ban on the sliding rigger and what the campaigners are arguing.
The original story of banning sliding riggers has all the drama and intrigue of a John le Carré spy novel. Think powerful postwar political blocks, new modern sporting systems, Olympic heroes and villains, suspected drug trials, Olympic boycotts and raised eyebrows from the Henley Stewards.
In recent weeks I have been in conversation with many of the key players behind the campaign to overturn a ban on a design that was set to transform the world of rowing. I have learnt that much of its history is secrets, whispers and hearsay, with the files from the 1980s locked away in the basement of World Rowing, Maison du Sport International, Lausanne, Switzerland. There are stories behind the stories and so much more than I could present below.
Much of the known history of “sliding” is detailed in leather-bound history books telling of innovative single scullers first wearing greased pants which transitioned into the sliding seat. It was at the 1872 Henley Royal Regatta where London Rowing Club first used sliding seats in a crew boat and won by such a large margin it was embarrassing. At this time there were attempts to engineer a sliding rigger and foot stretcher with a fixed seat to the boat. The advantage of the sliding rigger was self-evident from the start and for the next 100 years, various attempts were made to rework the design. It was not until 1980 with new computer modelling, new science, new composite materials and the motivation to finally see the sliding rigger fully realised. The design concept of “sliding” was a clear performance advantage an the underlying principle of “sliding” is all the same, it was just a question of which components in the boat are fixed.
Campaigners are arguing that the sliding rigger has been a part of rowing for as long as the seat and there has been a full century of study, investment in patents, scientific research and a great deal of trial and error. At no point during this time did FISA raise any concerns regarding the legality of the design. It was only because sliding seats were easier to achieve that they were universally adopted but the sliding rigger was never forgotten.
Credit for the first working sliding rigger must go to Volker Nolte a former West German National Champion. Nolte was completing his PhD in biomechanics and he developed as part of his dissertation a rowing computer model. As a point of interest, he changed the parameters of the program to model a sliding rigger setup and noticed that the numbers were far beyond what he expected. He discovered that on the recovery, there was more consistent boat speed as the boat no longer pitched with the shifting body weight of the rower. Nolte convinced Leo Wolloner, the foreman from Empacher to build a prototype and with some hard training, he raced the Dimond Sculls at Henley in 1981. The speed of the new boat was self-evident as he made it through to the Semi-finals, only to be beaten by the eventual winner, Chris Baillieu. At this point, the change.org campaigners argue, there was no more than a raised eyebrow of interest from the Henley Stewards. I love how Henley was and continues to be the place of innovation for the sport of rowing.
This is where things got murky, for as the story goes, the leading sculler at the time was the West German Peter-Michael Kolbe who was looking for an edge to win the World Championship but his ultimate goal was to win his first Olympic Gold. Volker Nolte convinced Kolbe to adopt the sliding rigger and he used it to win the 1981 and 1983 World Championships. But there was one sculler who could not adapt to the Nolte design, the Olympic Champion Pertti Johannes Karppinen of Finland. It has been reported that he did not like the feel of the design, one can imagine, especially as he was being consistently beaten by Kolbe and other scullers who made the transition. It soon became apparent that if something wasn’t done, the Olympic Champion Karppinen would be beaten by Kolbe at the 1984 LA Games. So a lobby formed and arguments of cost, safety and access were put forward.
As they say, the rest is history, the Nolte sliding rigger was banned, Kolbe was denied his Olympic Gold and the change.org campaigners argue that rowing is now stuck in the 1980’s. They say, “for the past 40 years, little has changed in rowing.” The change.org argues that FISA should never have banned the Nolte sliding rigger and it is now time for World Rowing to reverse the decision.
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