ROWING COLUMN:IN YEARS to come 2009 may be seen as a base year for Irish rowing. On the international front our able-bodied athletes had little to show bar a best placing (fourth) in the World Junior Championships – and we won't be competing in the European Championships this weekend. The domestic season was another scattered and formless one. But key problems of the sport are being addressed, and growth may be all the stronger for a period of lying fallow.
This weekend, about 30 athletes are expected to take part at the squad development camp at the National Rowing Centre, part of the behind-the-scenes work which grounds the comprehensive new high performance programme.
Martin McElroy, who heads up the system, talks of the importance of being honest about a sport which is not a “give it a lash” activity but rather hugely dependent on continuing hard work to reach the required standard.
Participants in the camp supply figures for their performance in the run-up to the event: if they do not validate them at the NRC they are not invited back to another camp, although they can enter the separate trials process.
The lack of numbers at the elite level was starkly evident this year, but an Ireland men’s eight, assembled for the occasion, won the time trial event at the Bremer Achter Cup in Germany on Saturday and had the third fastest time in the 400-metre sprint on the Sunday.
On the domestic front, as former president Frank Durkin detailed at last weekend’s agm, the numbers taking part in the sport, especially at junior level, are rising fast. And the new calendar, with its second National Championships sited on the last weekend of September, could give a boost to the sport in schools. A trophy paraded before a class is a sure way to pique interest among youngsters.
The agm provided ample evidence, for those who have observed them over time, of a change in the power base of the sport here.
The Munster contingent was pre-eminent for years, but on Saturday most of the speakers were from Leinster and Connacht. And the rise in the relative strength of Ulster at the top level has been very noticeable.
