Head of the Charles Regatta
This was a big weekend here in Boston where the world's largest regatta, the Head of the Charles, was run right outside my window on the Charles River. A total of 7500 rowers, mostly from university crews but also several from recreational and competitive crews from around the world (two Rowing Canada Olympic-track rowers were 3rd and 4th in the competitive class single sculls), competed in 26 races from Friday night until this afternoon. Seeing as I live on the course, I thought it would be wise to go down and check it out - plus, I had heard rumours of free food (confirmed) and the seventh stroke in the MIT-Sloan 8-man club crew works in my lab, so I had at least had some semblance of a rooting interest. It was also a spectacular day which made a six mile walk up and down the course a real pleasure. This is a very atypical rowing course in that the river bends repeatedly and the five bridges en route (four traffic bridges and the famous Weeks footbridge at Harvard, pictured below) have relatively narrow passages for the boats to pass through - given that the rowers are actually facing the opposite direction to their travel path, I was told that it is not unusual to see a boat (in particular the single and double sculls, in which there is no coxswain to guide the rowers along) ram into the bridge abutments, although I cannot confirm that since I saw no such incident while I was spectating.
Based on the huge number of competitors and the relative difficulty in keeping "on course", the boats are sent out at staggered intervals instead of coherently in heats as we are used to seeing in Olympic-type events. As a result, it is very difficult to figure out who is winning and who is losing, and at times it seems like the competition is just a series of boats out for a pleasant Saturday afternoon river trip. The excellent scenery along the course also did not help to shake this perception.
So, in many ways, the crowd was quite a bit more interesting than the races themselves. One thing that I definitely noticed was that the crowd was much different from a typical crowd of people at a Boston event - that is, very caucasian and very, let's say "not economically disadvantaged". There is certainly a "rowing culture" which attracts a certain type of person to the sport, and when you are used to such diversity around you, it is actually sticks out more to you when you are surrounded by a relatively homogeneous group of thousands of people. As an example of the prototypical rower which I encountered while touring the site, here is an actual coversation I overheard while walking by (I may have added one extra "like", but otherwise this is verbatim):
Girl #1 - So, like, the wind is, like, totally blowing at 20 miles an hour!
Girl #2 - Like, no way!
Fun! Oh, and the MIT crew I had the connection to? Well, they finished 49th out of 58 boats in their class. Well, you know, we are a little busy changing the world through technological advances around here, so what do you want? :)
