Henley Royal Regatta
A Love Letter to the Sport of Rowing and a Look at the Most Famous Rowing Regatta in the World
Apologies in advance, but there’s going to be a lot of embedded videos in this post. The beauty of rowing is in its fluidity of motion.
If you follow my page closely, you might have noticed that I’ve picked up rowing again after a long time away from the sport. I walked on to my college’s club team my freshman year and fell utterly in love with it.
Unfortunately for me, fate had different plans in mind and I ended up developing celiac disease while away at college. It took the better part of three years for me to get a proper diagnosis, and in the meantime I was sick as a dog and wasting away. I had to drop rowing as a result. Doing so was not an easy choice and one that I mournfully looked back on for the rest of my time in school.
After moving to Boston to work in biotech and a strong bout of post-covid ennui, I decided to reach out to my local club for some sculling lessons. Fast-forward a year, and I’m back to rowing competitively.
The decision to pick up the oars again after such a long time away from the sport has ignited in me a passion that I had been desperately searching for all throughout my early 20’s. I don’t think I’ve ever had such clarity of focus on a subject as I do right now (this is also a big reason why I’m posting a bit less frequently! I spend all my time either rowing, erging, or thinking about erging).
It’s incredibly difficult to convey the essence of rowing — from the outside, it looks so fluid, so simple to the point it seems relaxing, and yet, if you’ve ever picked up an oar handle, you’d know these descriptors could not be further from the truth.
Rowing is a sport of pure pain — a true labor of love. You push and push until every muscle in your body is screaming in agony and your vision darkens (one of the effects of hypoxia, affectionately referred to as the pain cave), and then you push some more. All of this while maintaining near-surgical precision with a 13-foot-long scalpel.
Sounds like hell right? Honestly it is, but for a select few of us, there’s nothing we’d rather do. It’s physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing, but at the same time, it’s just so right.
Enough about me, let’s move onto Henley.
Hosted in the small suburban town of Henley-on-Thames, about 30 miles West of London, the Henley Royal Regatta is one of the most prestigious events for the sport of rowing.
Henley is a little non-standard in a couple of ways:
The course itself is “one mile and 550 yards“ long, which works out to 2,112 meters. The standard rowing sprint is 2,000m — that extra hundred meters doesn’t sound like much, but those extra few seconds have seen many champions crowned. A great example from this year is the semifinal women’s single-scull event between Polish olympic medalist Marta Wieliczko and Sophia Luwis of the US (this is probably the best race in the entire event, you should watch it).
Luwis, despite being a lightweight and 5’6” (compared to Wieliczko’s 6’2”), stayed ahead for nearly the entire race, only to lose out in the final few strokes — a standard-length course might have secured her a win. Still, Luwis’s performance is a testament to the effect that good technique has on rowing. To go nearly beat an elite opponent that is 8 inches taller and 40+ pounds heavier is a crazy feat in a sport that so readily rewards height. The sport is far from an exhibition of brute strength or aerobic conditioning — none of that means anything if you’re not technically sound.
Another interesting feature of the course is that it’s 1v1. Most events that I’ve personally participated in have been up to five lanes wide — I’ve never raced just a single boat before. I imagine that having all of your focus concentrated on physically and psychologically breaking a single opponent is an insane feeling, and likely sets a lot of the strategy for the race in general.
A 2k is a long race, and it’s not always best for a crew to jump out to an early lead if it means decreased performance in the second half of the race. For reference, a 2k in an 8+ (that’s 8 rowers plus coxswain, the fastest boat class) takes about 6 minutes to complete. That’s an insanely long time for a dead sprint, and there’s ample opportunity to blow up and ruin the race.
That being said, if you want to force your opponent to give a little ground mentally, you’d probably want to pump them off of the start (and they’d likely try to do the same to you). Again, it’s a long race, but many have been decided within those first 20 strokes.
Before we move on, let’s quickly talk results:
Oxford Brookes and Leander have absolutely dominated this year — between the two clubs (including scratch crews), those two clubs have 14 wins out of 26 events between them. Insane.
Big ups to the Greenwich girls as well, the only team from the USA to bring home some hardware.
Also, Olli Zeidler is a fucking monster.
Okay finally it’s time to address the real reason why Henley is great: The Vibe.
Of course, a vibe is hard to put in words (by definition!), so here’s a vid recounting last year’s Henley from Eamon Glavin. If you’re interested in rowing, Eamon is a skilled videographer and is almost single-handedly ushering in a renaissance for the sport — highly recommend a follow.
Outside of the on-the-water exertions, the event itself is one big garden party. Everyone gathers at the race course in their glad-rags and has some debauched fun as they cheer on their favorite clubs.
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Henley has become synonymous with the rowing blazer due to the pretty strict formal dress code, in congruence with the sheer size of the event (over 400 crews is bound to attract a lot of viewers).
The blazer itself was actually “invented“ in the 1820s as a way to keep warm on the water — Lady Margaret Boat Club of Cambridge are credited with the coining of the term, whose scarlet-colored jackets imparted a blaze of red on the river Cam where they rowed.
Since then, the bright-colored blazers of the rowing clubs began to be used as identifiers so that spectators could easily pick out their team from the shores. The clubs took some liberties to allow themselves to stand out as much as possible, and has since turned into a sartorial spectacle (straw hats optional, but encouraged).
From the perspective of the US (where we’re much less formal and club/college association matters much less when it comes to dressing), this bit of ostentatiousness seems a little crazy, but remains visually interesting and absolutely magnetic — so much so that it’s spawned an entire brand dedicated to the exaltation of the rowing blazer, which itself started as a compendium of the various club blazers and the traditions that those clubs carry with them.
One of the most interesting blazer traditions belongs to the Dutch: Their blazers are passed down within the club and are only allowed to be washed if their crew wins a regatta called the Varsity (the most prestigious race in the Netherlands). This leads to some incredibly disgusting, torn-up blazers — just imagine literal decades of sweat and gunk that have never been addressed:
Each new owner also stitches their initials into the underside of the lapel, making the blazer a history book in its own right. A really incredible and unique sartorial tradition all around.
It’s pretty hard to get a ton of good pictures of the scene without physically being there (next year perhaps?), so I think I’ll leave it here before this piece incidentally becomes a free advertisement for Rowing Blazers. If you’ve skipped over them, I highly recommend going back and watching some of the videos I’ve embedded in this post. At Eamon’s and Pat’s (below) videos are really great at encapsulating Henley as a whole.
Enjoy this one last video from Pat Hanratty, the stroke seat for Thames RC’s 2022 Brittania Challenge Cup winner in the mens’ 4+:
Thanks for reading guys, hope you all have a great Independence Day Weekend!