Biomechanics

Modern trends in rowing speed and prognostic times

Words: Dr Valery Kleshnev

The trends in rowing speeds over the last 27 years (from 1993 to 2019) were recently discussed with Dr Volker Nolte, and he voiced his concern about the decrease in speed over the last decade. As speed is significantly affected by random weather conditions, it has high variation from year to year and the trends may not be statistically reliable. In an attempt to minimise the random factor and extract trustworthy trends, the speed of the winners of the Olympics and Worlds was analysed in decades, starting from 1993-2003, 1994-2004, 1995-2005 through to 2009-2019 with a total of 17 decades analysed. In each decade, linear trends of rowing speed were determined and their slopes (the speed growth per year) were analysed (see Fig.1 on following page).

The growth was consistently positive until 2001-2011, then it became negative in all decades except 2004-2014, because the tailwind at the Worlds 2014 in Amsterdam made it the fastest regatta ever. Approximation of this tendency with a third-order general trend shows that it is well determined statistically (r2=0.84), which means the random factor explains only 16% of its variation. The general trend of rowing speed became negative in 2007 (corresponding decade 2002-2012), and remains negative but stable, without further decrease.