Thanks to tectonic shifts in technology and training, Olympic-level rowing has come a long way since the University of Washington’s eight-man crew pulled off the ultimate underdog win at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany — the achievement celebrated in the brand-new movie adaptation of “The Boys in the Boat.”
On paper, the performance of the rowers at the center of the movie — and at the center of the bestselling book on which the movie is based — pales in comparison with current Olympic and world records. Today, the world’s fastest time for a 2,000-meter course is just under 5 minutes and 20 seconds, which is more than a minute faster than the time that won the gold medal for the Boys in the Boat in Berlin.
One of the big reasons for that speedup can be found at Everett, Wash.-based Pocock Racing Shells. The company’s founder, George Pocock, built the Husky Clipper — the boat in which the Boys won their Olympic gold. In the movie, Pocock (as portrayed by Peter Guinness) plays a role similar to Yoda in the Star Wars saga, performing wizardry with wood and dispensing wisdom at just the right moment.
Today, wood just doesn’t cut it for championship-level racing shells. “The boats have no wood,” says John Tytus, the current president of Pocock Racing Shells. “These boats are all built out of advanced composites, mainly carbon fiber — which, for its weight, is the strongest material available.”
Lightweight materials are just part of the equation. Hydrodynamics and computer modeling have helped Tytus and other boatbuilders tweak their designs to an extent that would impress even George Pocock.
Science has also transformed how today’s rowing men and women are being trained to outperform the Boys in the Boat. “As stark as the difference between wood and carbon fiber might be, the training volume that the crews do now, compared to what the Boys did in ’36 — that’s actually a bigger quantum leap,” Tytus says.
In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Tytus explains how innovations have taken athletic performance far beyond what moviegoers see when they watch “The Boys in the Boat.”
Building the boat
Although they’re made of sterner stuff, the racing shells that today’s rowers look pretty much the same as they did in 1936. But not exactly the same.
“There’s been a lot of work on the drag science,” Tytus says, “and so the boats are still long, but they’re not as long as they were back in the 1930s. We’re roughly talking about a 67-foot-long boat back then, 66 feet, depending on the size of the crew, [compared] to roughly 59 to 57 feet long now. But otherwise, yeah, they look very similar. Still long and skinny. Still very, very narrow. Still very tippy.”
Tytus says racing shells “are absolutely a different beast” from other boats, because they either stop or go backward every time the crew takes a stroke. That complicates the task of optimizing the way the boat moves through the water.
Engineers use computational fluid dynamics to fine-tune the design of the racing shells, as well as the shape of the oars that are used to propel them. And just as aerospace designers use wind tunnels to test out scale models of their airplanes, boatbuilders use towing tanks to put their models to real-world tests.
“A designer will build a scale model of the form of the hull that they want to drag through the water,” Tytus explains. “They load it up with sensors. The tow tank is then a pool of moving water that drags this form through that water. And it measures flow over the course of the surface area of that hull. Those have been around for a long time.”
When it comes to designing faster racing shells, the computer isn’t always right. “Whenever we design a new shape for a shell, a lot of it’s based on intuition and what we’ve proven to ourselves from previous iterations of hull design,” Tytus says, “because when we go and put certain shapes into various computer modeling applications, sometimes that shape looks promising in one modeling situation, and then in another program, it might look slow.”
Could artificial intelligence generate the optimal shape? “I’m afraid to go there,” Tytus admits. “I haven’t looked into that one, but I’m sure it’s coming.”
Today’s boats are built to be more adaptable to individual rowers. “The improvements would be in adjustability and what we call rigging in the sport, which is ways to modify the gearing per each athlete so that their load might be different from some of their teammates, in order to suit a different body type,” Tytus says.
Modern racing shells are wired up in ways that would have been impossible in 1936. In the movie, UW coxswain Bobby Moch (played by Luke Slattery) has a cone strapped to his mouth to urge on his eight-man crew. “Now, there’s a series of speakers in the boat, and you wear a headset,” UW women’s rowing coach Yasmin Farooq says. “And so there’s an amplification system in there.”
The racing shells are also equipped with sensors to track each rower’s performance. It wasn’t that long ago that coaches gauged their crew’s performance by eyeballing the spaces between the splashes thrown up by the oars.
“Now they have little computers on the boat, and the computers will tell you your distance per stroke, your 500-meter split and your actual speed in miles or kilometers per hour. And then of course it does your time,” Farooq says. “Also, we have these gauges you can put on the oarlocks that actually show how much force each person exerts on their blade.”
Once again, the computer doesn’t have the final word. “We will use those measurements to inform our decisions,” Farooq says, “but you still gotta have the eye at the end of the day. … When you’re doing it well, you know that computer is going to say it’s a good time.”
The human factor
The racing shells may have gotten shorter since the 1930s, but the rowers have definitely gotten bigger.
Director George Clooney and the production team for “The Boys in the Boat” put the actors portraying the Boys through five months of athletic training to get them in shape. However, even after all those workouts, there’s no way the actors — or for that matter, the 1936 Boys in the Boat — could match today’s top crews.
“The size of the actors that are acting — these are not rowers,” Tytus says. “These are actors that learned how to row well enough to film a movie. These guys are not ready to go to a national championship, trust me.”
The actors in the movie are probably similar, size-wise, to how athletes looked in the 1930s. But since then, the typical rower has become bigger and brawnier. “They average now maybe 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-6,” says Michael Callahan, head coach for men’s rowing at UW. “They weigh over 200 pounds. There’s a lot of lean muscle mass. They can produce a tremendous amount of power for six minutes.”
What’s changed? For one thing, the Boys in the Boat lacked the advantages that are typically available to today’s athletes, Callahan says.
“These guys lived through the Depression — and imagine their youth, growing up with poor nutrition and training practices,” he says. “They learned to row in college, and many of our rowers now learn to row in high school.”
The movie shows the UW crew building up their muscles by sawing through a giant log — which was actually part of the training routine back then. For today’s rowing crews, however, the training tool of choice isn’t a two-person saw but rather an ergometer rowing machine, also known as an erg. Over the years, the exercise machines have been fine-tuned to provide an experience that comes closer to feeling as if you’re actually in a boat.
On the erg, and in the boat, athletes are getting real-time feedback to help them fine-tune their performance in return.
“We’re using a lot more GPS,” Callahan says, “We know how fast we’re going at all moments. We know different training zones. … That data allows you to make more educated progress through your training program.”
The swing’s the thing
The Boys in the Boat probably wouldn’t believe how much their sport has evolved over the past 87 years. But Callahan says there are still some things his modern-day crews can learn from their predecessors.
“They had that ‘swing.’ They had that intangible,” he says. “It’s not really about the technology. It’s about nine people coming together as one, and I think that’s what they can learn. These guys were pulling for each other at the finish line, not for themselves.”
The way Farooq sees it, rowing is a sport that blends technology and biomechanics with less scientific factors, including the factor that rowers call swing.
“What’s it all about? It’s physics. It’s a sport of leverage,” she says. “It’s also a sport of endurance, power and mental toughness. So, somebody could have a really long arc initially, but if they don’t have the fitness and the power to support it, you can’t sustain it over the course of the race. And then the other thing is, somebody could have all three of those physical ingredients, but if you don’t have the mental toughness, it doesn’t mean anything.”
On top of all that, Farooq points to the feeling of pulling together — that intangible feeling of swing. “If a person comes off the power, the pressure in a boat, that kills the rhythm,” she says. “So, it doesn’t matter how strong the other people are, or the force, or arc that they are contributing. If one person comes off the rhythm, that’s it.”
Farooq wonders if that’s the sort of feeling AI could ever match.
“I don’t know if AI wants any part of that — unless AI gets to experience emotions,” she says. “When that happens, then I guess it will be meaningful to them.”
“The Boys in the Boat” goes into wide release this weekend. Consult your favorite local listings for showtimes — and get a look at the reviews in The Seattle Times (“a sweet adaptation”), The Washington Post (“handsome but familiar”) and The Associated Press (“both stirring and a tad stodgy”).
The University of Washington is in the midst of a fundraising campaign called Pulling Together, which is tied to the movie release and will benefit UW’s rowing and student support programs as well as the restoration of its historic ASUW Shell House. Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry is also playing up the movie connection with an exhibition titled “Pulling Together: A Brief History of Rowing in Seattle.”
Looking for more books and shows that feature rowing? Check out the original version of this item on Cosmic Log for recommendations from John Tytus — and stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Google, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Radio Public.
