Wed, Aug 03, 2016 page16

• RIO OLYMPICS: Seat No. 9 keeps the rowers in line

  • AP
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  In Olympic rowing, two people make a “pair” and four make a “four,” but eight will not do for an “eight.”

  Sitting in the stern in the biggest boat class is a ninth crew member, facing the others. He or she is the coxswain, typically a small person who plays such a big role that calling the boat a “nine” might seem more appropriate.

  “She’s our eyes and ears,” said Meghan Musnicki of the US women’s eight, the two-time defending Olympic champions, describing the role of coxswain Katelin Snyder. “And basically our brain, because we’re just hauling on it and in a lot of pain.”

  

  Germany’s men’s eight throw coxswain Martin Sauer into the water — a winners’ tradition — in Eton Dorney, England, after their gold-medal-winning race at the London Olympics on Aug. 1, 2012.

  Photo: AP

  The coxswain, or cox, makes sure the boat is going straight and the oars are swinging in sync and lets the crew know who is ahead and who is behind and by how much. If done right, the cox’s commands help the rowers push past the pain barrier and keep pulling their oars when every muscle fiber tells them to stop.

  It is a delicate task. How do you make rowers who already feel they’re giving everything to give even more when you are sitting in that ninth seat in relative comfort? Just telling them to “go faster” would not cut it.

  “Definitely not,” said Snyder, 28. “’Go faster’ could mean pull harder with my arms, or it could mean swing more with my body or step quicker with my legs. So when I want them to go faster, I have to specify where and how we’re going to do that together.”

  The men’s and women’s eight are the only boats with a coxswain in Olympic competition. It is a job that can seem thankless.

  “You pretty much can only screw up,” US women’s coach Tom Terhaar said. “They don’t get a lot of credit when they do a good job and if they make a mistake it’s obvious.”

  A bad cox is just dead weight. The coxswains do not row and they slow the boat down with their body weight, which explains why they tend to be so petite.

  Frances Turner, who coxes New Zealand’s women’s eight, said she started off rowing, but soon realized she was “too short and too loud and that I would be much better suited as a cox.”

  She thinks of herself partly as a psychologist, whose job starts long before the race begins.

  “You’ve got to know the athletes inside out,” Turner said. “Know their trigger points, know how the boat’s feeling and pull on those trigger points in a race when you need them so you can get the boat working completely harmoniously.”

  In training, the coxswains focus on stroke rates and other technical details and generally stay calm. In racing, they get loud and occasionally foul-mouthed as they try to squeeze every joule of energy out of the crew through the 2km course.

  These days the coxswain calls out commands using headsets hooked up to a so-called cox box, which is connected to speakers in the boat and amplifies their voice.

  “I always get stopped at the airport for it,” Snyder said. “It is a circle and it has a timer and a toggle. It looks a lot like a bomb.”

  Still, she would rather have a cox box in Rio de Janeiro than the weird-looking megaphones that coxswains used to strap to their faces in the old days.

  “They would scream through cones,” Snyder said. “So I’m really happy that’s not a thing anymore.”
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