Sport can sprint in a new direction

Rowing Column:Rowing can be thrilling to watch. In the last two Olympic Games, in Sydney and Athens, the last few metres of the men's four finals were among the most memorable moments. Crews battle it out for glory at the very edge of their abilities; one snatches gold in the very last few metres.

And yet the phrase which swirls around the sport is: rowing is not a spectator sport. Why?

In essence, a rowing race is one of the most basic and easily-understood of sporting spectacles. There are no points for technical merit; no arcane rules concerning equipment. If the lead is disputed between two or more crews in the closing stages, the crowd has spectacle aplenty.

But there's the rub. At the World Championships in Eton last year, only a handful of the finals had really close finishes. Modern rowing is run over 2,000 metres and with a system devised to ensure the best crews are in the most favoured lanes: the middle two of six. By the final 500 metres of a big event the crews are generally in the familiar chevron shape and finish in the expected order.

Barring a gut-busting performance from a crew in an outside lane - and all credit to the Ireland lightweight four at Eton - the final stages of a top-class race are generally much more like a marathon than a sprint event. The neutral spectator gets to clap appreciatively rather than roar.

It's rare to find radical ideas at the top of the tree in modern Ireland, but the president of the Irish Amateur Rowing Union (IARU), Frank Durkin, bucks that trend. He thinks he knows how to make rowing more of a spectator sport: run more sprint events over 500 and 1,000 metres.

The Carlow and Fermoy Regattas - which have the advantage of running events in a town setting - attract big spectator interest with shorter events, and Durkin thinks people are taken with seeing the whole of a race, something which is virtually impossible with a contest over 2,000 metres.

The huge regatta in Ghent in Belgium each year also draws huge crowds of cheering parents by running underage sprint races, Durkin points out.

Fisa, the world governing body of the sport, has flirted with sprint, but in recent years seems to have moved away from the idea. The massive expense of building the present system of 2,000 metre courses with a depth of three metres or more ensures a certain inertia and reluctance to embrace an idea that might make such huge expenditure problematic.

Certainly, if sprint events became the standard format, the size and shape of successful competitors would change - power events are very different to endurance tests - but there would be one big advantage, Durkin says. "TV would probably prefer it," he says. And with that should come money.

Over the last few years the IARU and the Dublin Dockland Development Authority have been circling around the idea of running sprints near the mouth of the Liffey, but nothing has been locked into place. It would be fitting if the sport which had roots in this area of the capital the century before last tried out a new idea in the same place.

The weather, which is always a factor in rowing, has struck down St Michael's Head of the River, which was scheduled for tomorrow. While the Shannon is rowable at O'Brien's Bridge, the water level is above the slip in the regatta field.

The organisers hope to reschedule the event.