BACK IN THE DAY

Rio 2016 marked the 40th anniversary of women’s rowing at the Olympic Games. Donna McLuskie looks back to the summer of 1976: the Montreal Games, and where it all started.

WORDS DONNA MCLUSKIE

In February 1976, oarswoman Anne Warner, a 1975 world championship silver medallist in the US women’s eight, caught pneumonia. Soon after, on the morning of 3 March, Warner and eighteen others from Yale women’s rowing team assembled themselves before the school’s director of women’s athletics, and proceeded to remove their tops in protest. Written across their chests and backs as they stood, half naked, was ‘Title IX’ (a reference to federal legislation that had been passed in 1972 which mandated athletic equality regardless of gender).

Their captain read from a statement: ‘On a day like today, the rain freezes on our skin. Then we sit for half an hour as the ice melts into our sweats to meet the sweat that has soaked our clothes underneath … half a dozen of us are sick now, and in two days’ time we will begin training twice every day….’.

There were no hot showers or locker rooms for the women’s rowing team at Yale in 1976. They had to wait on a bus while the men showered and changed before a thirty-mile drive back to campus from the boathouse. Olympian Ginny Gilder, who later supported Yale’s Gilder Boathouse build, recalls further humiliation when some oarsmen would refer to those female athletes as ‘sweathogs’.

The Olympics, held in Montreal that summer, were the first to offer women’s rowing events, despite their being offered to men since 1900. (Bad weather forced rowing to be cancelled in 1896). The inclusion of women was the culmination of years of planning and international cooperation, including necessary changes to the rowing world championships that would fulfil the International Olympic Committee’s requirement for world championship participation before a sport could be considered for Olympic status.