Revenge of the Lightweights

Quick! Which crew had the fastest time in the finals at this year’s Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta? You wouldn’t be wrong if you said Harvard. But the Harvard heavies finished second to Washington, the winners of the varsity eight race.

My friends, you are looking at the wrong Harvard crew. It was the Harvard lightweights who raced the 2,000 meters in a course record of 5:29.62.

The Harvard heavies were also very fast, but they finished in 5:30.75. And Washington, the heavyweight national champions, were 5:29.78, a whisker behind the lights.

Lightweights with the fastest time? In the A finals, yes.

(It’s only fair to point out that the California heavyweights, who missed the A finals with a crab near the end of their semifinal in atrocious conditions, made up for it the next day in the B finals by flying down the course in a time of 5:24.04. In fact, five of the crews in the heavyweight B finals went under 5:29.)

Are the times between the heavyweight and lightweight finals comparable? Can lightweights beat heavyweights?

No, not at the top levels. At virtually all colleges, the squads compete in practice, and although lightweights might take a piece or two throughout the season, on race day, they are faster only rarely.

Despite getting booted from the Olympics and suffering chronic financial, administrative, and admission malnourishment, lightweight rowing continues to thrive—even beating heavyweights in time (IRA, Harvard) and place (Henley Diamonds, Finn Hamill)—and provide exciting, fast racing for normal-size people.

In 1974, when FISA, the predecessor of World Rowing, introduced lightweight men’s events in its championship program, it was to create fair racing opportunities for men under 72.5 kilograms (159.8 pounds) because of the competitive advantage of size in rowing, which is akin to the athletic advantage of males over females.

It was also an acknowledgment that many of the world’s countries could not field oarsmen as tall and heavy as the men who were filling the openweight events. Lightweight rowing, which began at the University of Pennsylvania in 1917, attracted athletes of more normal dimensions.

Women’s lightweights were added to the FISA program in 1984 for women under 59 kg (130 lbs). The exhibition events in Montreal that year were the first time women raced the “men’s distance” of 2,000 meters in international competition. Before 1984, it was believed the longer distance was too strenuous for women. Similar attitudes had kept track events for women to no longer than 1,500 meters. That same year, Joan Benoit from Maine disproved that belief, winning the first Olympic marathon for women.

In 1996, after an international campaign to add lightweight events to the Olympics, the men’s and women’s doubles and the men’s coxless four were included.

In the eight Olympics that included lightweights, the men’s and women’s events featured some fantastic racing. The London Olympics of 2012 were acclaimed because of South Africa’s triumph in the men’s coxless four—the first, and still only, gold medal won by an African nation in Olympic rowing.

Top-level rowing was spreading to new continents—just as the Olympic movement had hoped. At the world championships, athletes from Turkey, Chile, Japan, Portugal, Guatemala, and Mexico began pushing for medals. Rowing’s appeal was growing, even if at the Olympic level the South Africans remained unique.

Yet after the 2016 Rio Olympics, for the sake of gender parity, the men’s light coxless four was axed from the Olympic program and replaced by the open women’s coxless four. Result: Seats for lightweight athletes fell from eight to four.

Then, in March, the International Olympic Committee and World Rowing seemingly drove another nail into the coffin when they decided there will be no lightweight events at the 2028 Olympics.

Even before that decision, rowing federations had stopped supporting lightweights, focusing instead on events that were in the Olympics.

The men’s lightweight eight was last contested in 2015. The legendary Italian lightweight eights, which won 13 gold medals and seven straight from 1985 to 1991 and were an inspiration to all rowers, were now ancient history.

With this year’s decision eliminating the possibility of winning Olympic medals, virtually all countries rolled back their support for lightweights, even at world-championship regattas.

I first paid attention to collegiate rowing when I was in high school. In that era, there was a widely circulated rumor that Steve Gladstone’s Harvard lightweights could beat Harry Parker’s Harvard heavies.

The 1971 lightweight crew was dubbed “The Superboat,” and they showed their speed by winning all their races, including a victory over heavyweight Kingston Rowing Club in the Thames Challenge Cup at Henley.

Was the rumor true? I’ve heard it told both ways, but there’s no question that these crews were very competitive. It doesn’t happen often, but there are occasions, like at this summer’s Henley, when lightweights can beat heavyweights.

Just because, once in a blue moon, lightweights can defeat heavies doesn’t justify their exclusion, however. World Rowing posted a piece on its website celebrating “the mental toughness propelling former lightweights to openweight success.”

That’s a weak justification for the decision to get rid of lightweights. Just because a few have made a successful move to openweights doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. What about all those who’ve been left behind?

I worry that young rowers who are still growing will look around and conclude that rowing is a sport for really big people only. Smaller, average-sized athletes may be discouraged from even trying rowing—the sport that teaches so many lessons and offers so many rewards.

The Harvard lightweights who dazzled at this year’s IRAs clearly benefited from a strong tailwind, which one coach described as “close to detrimental in that it whipped up the water into a furious boil.”

Nevertheless, this year’s Harvard crew was unworldly. They won the Goldthwait (HYP) Cup, the Eastern Sprints, the IRA, and capped it off by winning the Temple Challenge Cup at Henley, beating Oxford Brookes, a crew that had seemed invincible. In the 2024 Temple finals, Brookes had vanquished previously undefeated Harvard in the semifinals, the crew’s only loss that year.

How did the Harvard lightweights climb to the top of the podium? They’re a unified, hardworking team and a very strong group of guys, coach Billy Boyce said. The boat’s average 2K erg time: 6:14–with two studs under 6:10. That’s real power for men who must balance the scale at 155 pounds on race day.

As is the case with so many top college crews these days, it was an international boat—two oarsmen from the UK, two from California, one each from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. At Henley, the South African switched out for a Brit. The coxswain, Anya Cheng, was from Boston. (Delicious footnote: Anya had to race her sister, who was coxing the UVA men in the quarterfinals. Sister seat race!)

It isn’t just Harvard that has internationals filling its lightweight boats. Dartmouth, second at the IRA, had two oarsmen who came to the States to study and row at an Ivy League college. The Big Green had a Brit and a U23 Norwegian. But Dartmouth also had two Californians—stroke Ryan Tripp, who raced in the U23 lightweight double in 2023, and Cosmo Hondrogen, who returned from Poznan, Poland, in July with a silver medal in the U23 single.

“How did they race?” I asked Boyce, about Harvard.

Their strength and the source of their speed, he said, was the transition from the high strokes to the base. They didn’t take more than 25 high strokes at the start, they got up to speed in that 25, and then just kept it going.

“It seemed like we would almost go faster when we shifted the rate down; the splits would often show that. In the minute after shifting, we would usually take a length. We don’t plan big moves, because with a planned move, there’s a natural tendency to wait for it and then take your foot off the gas afterward. Our mantra was ‘Go fast and keep going fast.’”

Their racing at Henley (available on YouTube) followed that pattern. They had tough races against two Dutch crews, Aegir and Nereus, and when they would draw level at the Barrier (about 650 meters), they would keep going.

“When we nosed ahead of Brookes at the Barrier, I knew we were going to win.”

But no 2,112-meter race is ever easy. They were pushed the whole way. The margin at the finish line for both the semifinal and the final was less than a length.

Only once has lightweight rowing had a threepeat at the IRA, when Cornell won in 2006, ’07, and ’08. With a boat that had only one senior oarsman and a senior coxswain, Harvard will be gunning for a third consecutive title. But you can be sure there are other rising programs that will push hard to take the Crimson down.

Beginning this year, the men’s and women’s lightweight pairs and quads have been dropped from the world championships.

Great Britain’s superb crew of Emily Craig and Imogen Grant missed a bronze at Tokyo by one-hundredth of a second. Their return three years later at Paris to win gold by 1.72 seconds was one of the great stories from the Olympic rowing venue. The loss of the lightweight doubles means that races like the women’s double in Tokyo, where the first five women’s crews were within a second, are finis.

“Henley is our world stage,” Boyce said. Without lightweight events at the Olympics, competing for the Temple Cup is as close as lightweight athletes can get to showing their speed on a big stage.

Coach Trevor Michelson of Dartmouth echoes this, noting that the Eastern Sprints league is virtually all that is left for lightweight athletes. The upside, if you want to call it that, is that if you are a lightweight-sized person, the Sprints colleges are it. That results in their boats getting faster and faster. It’s the premier venue for lightweight rowing in the world.

How to explain these improvements in boat speed?

Coach Michelson points to erg scores getting better. The usual reasons for how athletic performance keeps improving—better equipment, training methods, nutrition, and data analysis via telemetry—have been boosted by another factor: Freshmen are allowed to row varsity. Kids take gap years. They are older and have trained more.

“What that really means is that the JVs are going to be faster. They are much closer to varsity boats than they used to be, pushing varsity boats harder in practice. The times for JV crews bear that out.”

Michelson observes that none of the 2025 IRA lightweight varsity-medal winners—Harvard, Dartmouth, and M.I.T.—even qualified for the IRA in 2022.

“In the lightweight world, there is more emphasis on development and teaching. It’s not all about recruiting. Look how rarely a heavyweight program moves from the bottom to the top of the league. Compare that with lightweights. There’s a lot more movement up the ranks.”

Perhaps the biggest shocker from this year’s Henley Royal Regatta was that a former lightweight from New Zealand, Finn Hamill, beat Olli Zeidler, the reigning Olympic champion in the single, in the semifinals of the Diamond Sculls.

If you watch the race on YouTube, you’ll see that the German blasts off from the start and takes what looks like a commanding two-length lead at the Barrier, the way he does in all the big races.

But Hamill never gave up and drew even with the four-time winner of the Diamonds in front of the Enclosures, and then passed him to win by a length.

Hamill is no rookie, and it’s clear from watching him race that he’s not intimidated by being behind. He obviously has a tremendous motor that just doesn’t slow down. There was rough water in his race with Zeidler, but Hamill handled it well, as befits someone who, last September, won the 4K coastal men’s single event. Hamill was not intimidated by the 6-foot-8 German, having beaten the Dutch Olympic bronze medalist Simon Van Dorp the day before.

I asked Finn about being a lightweight and racing against heavyweights.

“I’ve always lined up against people much bigger than me, so I have had to work very hard on technical aspects. I used to grab with my shoulders at the catch; I’ve worked hard to be more relaxed.”

He has done just that. Perhaps because he is also a coastal-rowing champion who knows how to stay calm when the water is roiling, you can see that he doesn’t let bad water bother him.

Of his race against Zeidler, he said: “I knew I’d be well off his pace in the first half of the race. I could tell that he had shot out, but then he stopped moving. I couldn’t believe that I was right with him. And then when I raised the rate to 41, I didn’t need to turn my head to see him; I was there. And then I was moving past him, just trying to keep it going.”

For his part, Zeidler posted on Instagram that after taking 11 months off after the Olympics he was not disappointed in his racing.

“Two wins and then a defeat reflect an honest result,” he said. “It’s utopian to think you can just show up and win without proper months-long preparation.”

Even in defeat in the finals the next day against another Dutch sculler, Melvin Twellaar, Hamill kept pushing the rating up and moving back in the second half of the race. Moreover, all his terrific performances in the single came despite also racing in the double sculls, an event that he and his partner, Ben Mason, 6-foot-2 and 210 pounds, won. How would you like to face an Olympic medalist in your second race of the day?

Hamill, who rows at Waikato Rowing Club on the North Island, follows a training program different from that of most other Kiwis.

“I probably have the least amount of volume during the racing season. I do a lot of high-intensity.”

At Henley, there are no weigh-ins and no lightweight events. Lightweights relish the opportunity to race with full bellies. Hamill was “about 175.” The last time he rowed as a lightweight was 2023, when he won a silver medal in the lightweight single at the world championships.

“Before the Rio Olympics, New Zealand had a very good lightweight program, the best of which was a coxless four, but once the Olympics dropped the event, Rowing New Zealand did, too.

“It was only because of the efforts of Matt Dunham that lightweight rowing was kept alive in New Zealand through to Paris. In the end, RowingNZ wouldn’t select a crew to race in 2024, which ended my dream of racing the lightweight double at the Olympics.

“With lightweight now becoming a thing of the past for Olympic rowing, we have to step up against the bigger guys. I was very sad to see lightweight events go. They were such competitive events.

“I love all rowing and boats—sailing, coastal rowing, even Beach Sprints. My goal is to compete at the LA Games. My doubles partner and I will trial in August for the world championships.”

Will we see him at the 2025 worlds in the double?

The affable 23-year-old has a lot of rowing ahead of him. He won the Head of the Charles and the Head of the Schuylkill championship singles events and loved those races. He’ll be back in the U.S. this October.

Don’t bet against this former lightweight.

 

Andy Anderson, a.k.a. Doctor Rowing, has been coxing, coaching, and sculling for 55 years. When not writing, coaching, or thinking about rowing, he teaches at Groton School and considers the fact that all three of his children rowed and coxed—and none played lacrosse—his single greatest success.

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