Putney Town Rowing Club

In a recent article in The Times (”You need brass to go for gold“), Matthew Syed claims that sports such as rowing are not as competitive as other sports because you need to have a lot of financial backing to participate in them.

We like to kid ourselves that Sir Steve Redgrave is the greatest British sportsman in history so far, for winning five successive golds in rowing — a sport so elitist that it is virtually non-existent across much of the planet. I suspect that Redgrave would not have qualified for a single Olympic final, let alone won any, had rowing been accessible to, say, 1 per cent of the population of Africa — a continent that dominates running, for which the only equipment needed is decent shoes.

Member Peter Rossi, who learned to row on Putney Town’s beginners course wrote to The Times (”Success, not diversity“) to set the record straight. (continue reading…)