The Rowing Technology Top Crews Are Using To Win

Shortly after the U.S. men’s four won gold at the Paris Olympics, coach Casey Galvanek was asked, “What made the difference, what was special about this crew?”

His reply: “Hip mobility.”

Galvanek, like other recent winning coaches, utilized new technology and data analysis to teach improvements to what was already a world-class crew—and to sell the oarsmen on the changes he was asking them to make.

The crew of Nick Mead, Justin Best, Michael Grady, and Liam Corrigan had won silver already at the 2023 World Rowing Championships and earned a place in the Olympic regatta (since 1996, competing nations have had to qualify for each of the 14, now 12, Olympic events). They were one of the best U.S. fours ever, and favorites for a medal in Paris.

But to make the step to winning the Olympics, they needed to be even better. Small adjustments, some smaller than could be perceived by the human eye, produced the extra speed that won gold.

Galvanek and his fellow Olympic coaches used innovative in-boat measuring technology, video, and other digital-age tools to make the U.S. men’s four and eight into Olympic medalists. Electronics like Active Tool’s ActiveSpeed, NK’s SpeedCoach, NK’s EmPower oarlock, Peach Innovations’ PowerLine system, SmartOar, and XBoat provide rowing coaches the data to improve performance and win championships.

The Peach system uses a proprietary oarlock incorporating precision sensors in place of the standard Concept2 oarlock to measure forces and angles applied to the pin to calculate power curves through the stroke, catch angle, finish angle, timing, and handle path. Combined with information from motion sensors collecting data from hull-mounted impellers, these systems can measure minute changes in practically everything a rower does and correlated changes in boat speed, acceleration, and check.

What the Peach system can show with its precision accelerometer is that boat speed actually increases, significantly, after the release when, instead of sitting on the back of the seat at the finish, rowers shift their body weight to the front of the seat (toward the stern), which moves the shell forward as they initiate the recovery. The Peach system enables the coach to show an athlete, empirically, how rotating his pelvis forward and up, instead of just sitting at the finish and initiating the recovery with hands away, makes the boat go its fastest.

Doing that takes hip mobility.

Precise in-boat measuring technology, combined with video review and cutting-edge coaching, improved the Olympic-champion four’s catch as well.

In NBC’s broadcast of the Paris final, there’s a shot of the bows of the U.S. and New Zealand fours that shows the American crew’s boat gliding smoothly ahead compared to the Kiwi’s powerful thrust and check.

On the erg, the silver-medal-winning New Zealand crew could produce more power as measured in watts. But on the water, a smooth catch and applying pressure on the foot stretchers together (which the Peach system measures also), makes the application of power more effective.

“We didn’t have the most watts,” Galvanek said, “so we needed to find the speed as easy as possible. So we focused on that.”

Coordinating the technique of each member of a crew so all row as one can be a coach’s greatest challenge—and make the greatest crew. There again, precision measuring technology, combined with video and coaching, yields today’s best crews.

While coaching the U.S. National Team men’s eight, Michael Callahan used his Peach system from the University of Washington to refine and unify the technique of the crew selected by Galvanek. He knew that how they came out of bow at the release could make the boat faster. He also fine-tuned their approach to the catch, telling them, “You’re going to have to beat the other crews on the recovery as well as the drive.”

The eight oarsmen in the Olympic eight ranged from 6-foot-1 to 6-foot-6 in height, with at least as much variation in limb length and power application. Some got their heels down at the catch, one drove off the balls of his feet through the whole stroke, and another got his heels down halfway through the drive.

Using foot-stretcher pressure-sensor data and power-curve measurements, Callahan could show the heels-down-halfway rower how his power dipped mid-drive and teach him to match up better. He also could see that the power curve of the balls-of-the-feet oarsman matched up just fine, and no change was warranted.

He rigged each seat individually, as he and his coaching staff do at Washington, to suit each athlete’s dimensions, based partly on Peach-detected data. The athlete whose handle path was in front of everyone else’s could move his foot stretchers to bow. The rower who struggled to swing out of bow due to an old injury had his seat angled forward. Longer-limbed oarsmen might have their spread or inboard adjusted to make the crew more efficient.

By July, the crew that had to go through the last-chance qualifying regatta in May just to race in Paris won the bronze, the first Olympic medal for a U.S. eight since 2016.

Like almost every U.S. National Team rower, sweep oarsman-turned-Olympic-single-sculler Jacob Plihal hits the water with an NK SpeedCoach, a heart-rate monitor, and a GPS watch. He’s also added a new system from start-up XBoat, a company led by former collegiate lightweight oarsmen Jordi Cabanas (Princeton ’19) and Tom Lee (Yale ’90). XBoat amasses a large amount of data similar to what Peach provides and also measures force at the pin with a replacement oarlock.

Using Bluetooth, the XBoat technology, however, downloads the data to the phones of rowers and coaches automatically, which streamlines the process. The system is designed from the start to integrate with any kind of sensor, including biological and environmental. It’s all about “more ways to collect data and use it,” Plihal said.

XBoat is designed to fit into the rowing experience as seamlessly as possible, Cabanas says.

“When you come back, the data is just there.”

The intent of XBoat’s founders is to provide rowers and coaches useful information as quickly and directly as possible.

Plihal, who began rowing in high school in Vashon Island, Wash., graduated from Boston’s Northeastern University in 2018, where he captained the crew and was nominated an IRA all-American three times. He sculled in quads and doubles on U23, World Rowing Cup, and Pan American teams but went into the 2024 Olympic year as a sweep rower.

He switched to the single for Olympic trials in April and won the right to represent the U.S. in Paris, where he raced a 6:41.9, the fastest time ever by a U.S. single sculler.

“The initial user feedback of improvement when using XBoat is night and day,” said Cabanas, a self-described “nerd in the boat.”

“It’s a generational shift,” Lee said. “I can’t see how a non-data-focused team can win in the near future.”

XBoat has not been released for sale to the general public yet.

Plihal says XBoat’s measurements of his stroke length, catch angle, finish angle, power produced in watts, force curve, and acceleration profiles are crucial to ensuring that “perception matches reality” and useful as “a reminder and quick check-in” as he trains and improves.

Reigning collegiate national-champion coaches Michael Callahan (Washington heavyweight men), Billy Boyce (Harvard lightweight men), and Paul Rassam (Princeton lightweight women) all use NK SpeedCoaches and the Peach system and all cited two key benefits of the in-boat measurement technologies: validation and reinforcement.

“It’s another way to show the athlete what we’re talking about,” said Rassam, who used the Peach system sparingly for five or six years (the last four of which the Tigers have won the IRA national championship), mostly in the early part of the season. This year, after graduating two consecutive classes of “very influential” seniors, Rassam plans to use the technology more as he coaches a smaller squad featuring an “impressive” freshman class, including walk-ons.

Boyce, whose Harvard varsity and second varsity eights both won at last year’s IRA by clear margins, also uses the Peach system for “confirmation, to verify things that you think.”

“You have to be cautious to not go off on a weird direction or to not trust the stopwatch or your eye. We check that we’re matching up, but we don’t get too into the weeds with it. We use it in a general way. The more you use it, the more you get from it.”

Peach Innovations grew out of the after-hours hobby of Paul Haines, a British club oarsman. Haines studied at Cambridge and “failed to leave,” working for a dozen years in sensor design and developing onboard electronics for professional motorsport. (Most IndyCar, Formula 1, and other teams are based in the UK.)

In the late ’90s, a Cambridge oarsman remarked to Haines, “It’d be nice if we had that for rowing.” So in his spare time Haines began developing systems for rowing, deciding to “give it a go” in 2001.

“When it comes to sensor design, we really do know what we’re talking about.”

Originally, the Peach system was a technical tool used by crews to develop efficiency. Haines emphasizes that it’s a system rather than just individual measurements. Over the past 20 years, it’s become an everyday tool that helps athletes understand pacing in both training and racing and optimize effort to achieve the day’s objective, whether producing 200 watts for an hour’s training or avoiding blowing up in a race by going too hard off the start.

Especially with college athletes, measuring force output “can get in the guys’ heads, all trying to juice the watts,” said Harvard’s Boyce—and rowing badly as a result.

Callahan sees the same thing, noting that an oarsman can actually register more measured watts while rowing poorly and making the boat slower.

Peach’s Haines agrees: “You can row like an absolute donkey and produce more watts.”

Overeliance on data has its drawbacks. In basketball, “shooting the three” because data analysis shows three-point shot attempts have the greatest positive outcome on NBA games has dulled the entertainment value of professional basketball.

During the 2010s, Team Sky (later Ineos) cyclists won seven Tours de France in eight years, spending much of their time looking down at their power meters as the biggest-budget, data-driven team “reduced much of cycling’s mystery to mathematical formulas” and “methodical, almost robotic racing,” Velo magazine lamented.

Might data analysis lead crews to a homogeneous rowing style, turning races into waterborne erg tests and robbing the sport of its soul?

“People love numbers but don’t necessarily understand how to use them,” Haines said. “There’s a lot of noise in boats. There really is a limit to the accuracy of what is being measured, and the measurements are proxies” of what makes a boat go faster. “It’s only a tool to help the coach.”

Texas coach Dave O’Neill uses SmartOars for athlete development, selection, and lineups. He calls the system, which uses oar-mounted strain gauges to measure force, “just the right amount of technology to be useful.”

“You don’t have to dedicate a whole boat to use it.”

O’Neill likes being able to use a set, or just a pair, of oars in any boat with any crew, without all the equipment mounting, setup, and calibration required of other systems.

SmartOar’s Bob Martin says the ideal user is the coach who is interested in data and willing and able to use it consistently. “If you commit yourself to a system, you need to use it with intelligence and discipline,” Martin said.

“We have not become dependent on technology,” O’Neill said. After using a SmartOar, which can transmit data live to the coach via a tablet in the launch as well as store it for later viewing, “our athletes generally know what their power curve is.”

“There is still an art to it you can’t measure,” said the coach of the defending national champions.

The most comprehensive and complex systems involve considerable costs—in both time and money,

A basic PowerLine setup from Peach Innovations costs about $10,250, and optional equipment like foot-stretcher force sensors cost another $1,400 each.

Rower displays, coach displays, seat-position sensors, and other options can add hundreds and thousands. Although the wait time for new Peach systems stretches from months to over a year, Martin says coaches have been understanding and patient.

Installing and setting up a Peach system in a rowing shell is no small task. Getting it right is essential, and running wires from each oarlock and other system components, such as impeller-sensor pickups, displays, and foot-stretcher sensors, takes considerable time and effort.

It also adds weight to the boat. Some crews race with the system still installed, using it to record race data for later evaluation. Others race with it because they don’t have the time or inclination to take it out and then re-install it later.

At the other end of the accessibility spectrum—in terms of time, money, and effort—is in-boat technology from Active Tools and Nielsen-Kellerman. Accessibility, in fact, was the original design criterium for NK when developing the SpeedCoach and EmPower oarlock products, said Michael Naughton, a long-time oarsman and rowing coach who is Nielsen-Kellerman’s chief operating officer.

“Our philosophy is to design and produce products that are accessible around the world in terms of price point, availability, ease of installation, ease of use, and value while rowing,” Naughton said.

Active Tools also makes practical, day-to-day performance-measuring electronics for rowing. Its ActiveSpeed measures, displays, and records speed (both from GPS and a wireless impeller), stroke rate and count, check, distance, time, and heart rate. As many as five in-boat units can transmit data to a coach following on the water using the Coach Link.

“In-boat display systems lead to rowers’ making changes much faster,” said Active Tools’ John Ewans.

The UK-based company’s soon-to-be-released next product will be an oarlock-based measuring system called RapidFit, which features a power module that can be snapped in and out of oarlocks on different boats and that “remembers” each shell’s rigging setup via a radio-frequency-identification chip.

The new system will allow the least expensive part, the plastic oarlock, to be installed on multiple shells, while a single power module can be used across a club’s fleet.

“We see it as a game-changer for clubs,” Ewans said.

NK, which developed and produced the original performance monitor for the ubiquitous Concept2 erg, applies the same philosophy of “erg simple” data presentation so athletes can make “next stroke” improvements as they row.

For the EmPower oarlock, NK nixed a graphical representation of the rower’s force curve on the in-boat SpeedCoach display (that and other data are available via NK’s LogBook app on iPhones and Android devices) because interpreting it is subjective and often inaccurate, especially during extreme exertion.

Instead, the EmPower oarlock sends catch-angle, finish-angle, force, stroke-rate, and other data that are displayed numerically and simultaneously—whichever data the user selects—on the SpeedCoach screen.

In a demonstration he presents at coaching conferences, Naughton asks participants to evaluate five graphical curves in rapid succession (few can do so accurately) followed by five numbers representing angles (everyone can) to demonstrate how much easier it is to understand numbers.

“Everyone knows stroke rate; few understand catch angle, which NK wants to help rowers know,” Naughton said. “Technical metrics are part of NK’s normal vocabulary: catch angle, finish angle, peak force, slip, wash, and effective stroke length. I want to get to where that’s part of rowers’ and coaches’ vocabulary.

“We designed a system for the coach to provide athletes with technical and performance targets, and the athletes know if they hit them. All of it is in real time, when the athletes are most likely to be able to make a sustainable change. It’s just like we do with stroke rate—every stroke of every session.”

Although the in-boat technology of today and tomorrow can generate an unlimited supply of information (O’Neill: “an avalanche”), it will never replace the coach. In fact, it makes the coach even more important.

“How we give the athlete information is more important than the information,” Callahan said. Rowers, especially the highly trained and experienced, may regard the barrage of precise measurements as wholly negative feedback—all that they’re doing wrong—and destroy their confidence.

It also can aid coaches in dealing with the attitudes that often come with highly recruited athletes, who have well-developed confidence in the skills that landed them at the top programs. By showing, with indisputable data, how certain proposed changes make the boat faster, coaches can use the in-boat technology to sell them to their rowers.

“Crossing the chasm of trust from the national team-level athlete as a junior coach, that’s a big leap for a lot of athletes,” Galvanek said.

Having used the latest in-boat technology to coach a world-class crew up to the next, and ultimate, level of Olympic champion, he should know.

Chip Davis is the founder and publisher of Rowing News. An oarsman from birth, he rowed on championship crews at St. Paul’s School and Dartmouth College, where he captained the lightweights. Now he sculls in Vermont when the weather is suitable and ergs the other half of the year.

The post The Rowing Technology Top Crews Are Using To Win appeared first on Rowing News.