This week’s video is the last in the “What makes an Olympic rower” series – you can see the previous two videos here and here. The rower in this video talks about what training was like for a 2012 Olympian. Obviously the training they do and their nutrition is wildly better than what those from 1908 and 1948 had but something I didn’t know was that all the athletes are expected to have their own single that they purchase using the money they get from lottery funding. I know the US athletes get a small stipend but it’s puny … less than $1000/month and less than $500/month for those who haven’t won a medal. Definitely not something you could go out and by a top-of-the-line single with.

The UK team by comparison is fully funded by the government and had a $43 million budget for the 2012 Olympics compared to USRowing’s $3.5 million, meaning it’s unlikely their athletes needed to have a job (let alone a full-time salaried job with a part-time job on the side) to pay the bills while training. This article from Fortune magazine does a good job of explaining the finances of USRowing to give you a sense of how it all works.

This week’s VOTW is a continuation of the one I posted two weeks ago and is about the state of Olympic rowing post-WW2, which you can watch here.

This one features an interview with a “rower” who talks about the competitors at the 1948 London games (Germany and Japan being understandably absent), the training regime for athletes just returning home from war, what his daily schedule was like, and what it was like trying to maintain an athlete’s diet when so much food was still being rationed.

You’ll have to click over to watch this week’s VOTW which gives an idea of  what rowing was like at the 1908 Olympics. A reader sent me this around Christmas (thanks Rob!) along with two other videos from the same series that I’ll be posting in the coming weeks. All three discuss rowing at the three London Olympics (1908, 1948, and 2012) and were made by the River & Rowing museum in Henley.

This week’s video talks about rowing at the first London Olympics in 1908 and gives some history of what the early games were like. Fun fact, these games weren’t actually supposed to be held in London. Rome originally won the bid but were re-located after Mt. Vesuvius erupted three weeks before the opening ceremony and funds had to be diverted towards rebuilding Naples.