New focus on women needed

Rowing Round-upRowing did well out of the carding scheme announced by the Irish Sports Council yesterday - but only men's rowing. Of the 23 individual recipients of funding for 2005, only two are women, and one of these, Alison Downey, is on a development grant.

The sheer class of Sinead Jennings has tended to deflect attention from what is a crisis in the sport. While there are good women's club rowers, the small number of elite women rowers and the poor results of the junior women at last weekend's national time trial should have set alarm bells ringing.

"Their level of performance was dramatically down on the boys'," admits national coach Harald Jahrling. "We have to pay more attention to developing women's rowing."

Jahrling's sees the problem in the context of the over-emphasis on lightweight men's rowing in Ireland, and thinks the solution must come from identifying young women with the right body shapes early on.

The very top women tend to be 182 cm (6ft) tall and built to match, and these must be identified. "You must find the right bodies for the sport," the national coach says.

On the positive side, Jahrling points out that women develop more quickly than men, so in three to four years a good crew could be created.

He knows what he is talking about. Jahrling was women's national coach in Australia until the last Olympics and played a big part in hauling women's rowing there into the limelight: the women's eight which made the breakthrough by winning the World Championships in 2001 were coached by him.

His wife, Debbie Fox, worked on talent identification in New South Wales, where the state's institute of sport targeted athletes through an emerging athletes programme.

But Jahrling says it is the clubs who must go out and find the new generation of athletes.

The German will have a bigger team soon, as the Irish Amateur Rowing Union (IARU) are advertising for an assistant coach. The position of high performance director will not be part of the new set-up.

Meanwhile, he was not happy with the validity of some of the ergometer scores he received this month and the next set must be done in independently monitored centres in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Limerick.

Sam Lynch is not part of the programme for the year but, according to the IARU, has been given the full grant because he reached the required targets, and his aim this year of bulking up is dedicated to achieving results down the line as a heavyweight.