Selection. Everyone who's rowed competitively at any level will know the grim repercussions of the word: whether it’s GB trials, an upcoming week of seat-racing on training camp, a 2k test, or a subjective "decision" to be gleaned from months of studiously-recorded data.
I rowed for the University of London Boat Club for three years, and heard about the “ERGO" story from Jamie Cook, an athlete who went to Abingdon School. A few years ago, a coach couldn't decide how to choose between two of his athletes for the last seat in the top boat: he told them to hang from the wooden Abingdon boathouse beams, and the first to drop would lose his seat in the boat. Competitive sport forces people to their mental and physical limits, pushing them far beyond the usual realms of everyday experience; a goldmine for a filmmaker. Yet, rowing has had mixed success on-screen: the awkward five-man quintuple in Take That’s music video ‘The Flood’ (2010); the Henley scene from The Social Network (2010) (they filmed the race at 20spm then sped it up in the edit); True Blue (1996); Summer Storm (2004) and Backwards (2012), which has a dour 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.