Racing on water is older than most rulebooks. These stories run from a 1715 wager for an orange coat on the Thames to a boat that flies on foils at fifty knots, by way of a keel hidden under tarpaulins, a hired boy who won Olympic gold and was never named, two rowers given the same official time, and a pair of lucky red socks that a whole country copied.
Every tile in a Sailing and Rowing game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Races
nine stories
1An actor's wager, rowed every year since 1715
On the tile: Doggett's Coat1715
Thomas Doggett was an actor from Dublin who worked the London stage. In 1715, to honor the House of Hanover and the accession of King George I, he funded a prize for young Thames watermen: a coat and badge, presented new to the winner each year. The Fishmongers' Company took over managing the race in 1722, after Doggett died, and has run it ever since. Up to six watermen just out of their apprenticeship row it under eleven bridges, from London Bridge to Cadogan Pier in Chelsea.
2The river was too narrow to race, so they gave chase
On the tile: The Bumpsfrom 1827
The Cam winds, and it is so narrow that two boats cannot race side by side. Cambridge colleges solved that with bumps racing, whose first running was in 1827, started by a boatman named Bowtell who had a wooden leg. Crews line up in last year's finishing order with about 90 feet of clear water between them. A cannon fires, and each crew chases the boat ahead. Touch it, or make it concede, and the two swap starting places the next day.
3Cambridge asked for a race near London and got Henley
On the tile: Henley 18291829
Two schoolfellows from Harrow started it: Charles Wordsworth of Christ Church, Oxford, nephew of the poet, and Charles Merivale of St John's, Cambridge. In February 1829 Cambridge sent a formal challenge to Oxford "to row a match at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat during the ensuing Easter vacation." The race that followed was held on June 10, not near London at all, but at Henley on Thames. Oxford won easily, and their boat can still be seen at Henley today.
Henley Royal Regatta measures its course in miles and yards, and the number is odd: one mile 550 yards. There is no tradition behind it, only geography. The regatta's own account says that was simply the longest stretch of open water available on the Henley Reach in 1839, the year the regatta began. A straighter course came later, which meant cutting away part of Temple Island and part of the Berkshire bank. Since 1886 only two crews race at a time.
The America's Cup is often called the Hundred Guinea Cup. The Royal Yacht Squadron, which offered it, is firm that the prize for its race around the Isle of Wight on August 22, 1851 was a cup of one hundred sovereigns, not guineas. The American schooner America won, though the wind died at the finish and the much smaller cutter Aurora came in only about eight minutes behind her. The wrong name took hold in America, where the cup was later engraved with it, and a hundred guineas would have been 105 pounds.
6An English coach's idea became America's biggest regatta
On the tile: The Charles1965
In 1965 three members of the Cambridge Boat Club, D'Arcy MacMahon, Howard McIntyre and Jack Vincent, took the advice of Harvard's sculling instructor Ernest Arlett and staged an English-style head race on the Charles River. In a head race the boats start about fifteen seconds apart and row against the clock rather than alongside each other. The first one drew more than 250 oarsmen in nearly 100 boats and almost no spectators. It now runs three days and draws more than 12,000 athletes across 74 events.
7A holiday cruise that a navy officer turned into a race
On the tile: Sydney-Hobart1945
Members of a new Sydney cruising club planned an easy sail down to Hobart for the first Christmas after the war. John Illingworth, a Royal Navy officer based at the Garden Island dockyard, suggested they make a race of it, handicapped so the big fast yachts would rate equally with the small slow ones. Nine yachts started on Boxing Day, 1945. Illingworth won it himself, taking line honors and the handicap in a recently bought boat of about 35 feet called Rani, the smallest in the fleet, after six days and 14 hours at sea.
8Thirteen skippers started the first one, and seven returned
On the tile: Vendée Globe1989
Philippe Jeantot had twice won a solo race around the world with stops, and wanted one without them. The Vendée Globe he founded is sailed alone, nonstop and without assistance, out of Les Sables-d'Olonne on the French Atlantic coast and back into the same harbor. Thirteen skippers started the first edition on November 26, 1989, and only seven returned. Titouan Lamazou won it in 109 days. The race is now widely called the Everest of the Seas.
9The women's Boat Race waited 88 years for the same water
On the tile: Women's Race2015
The Boat Race dates its women's race from 1927, but that first meeting on the Isis at Oxford was not a race as we would know one. The two crews were not allowed on the river at the same time, and judges scored them on time and style. Side-by-side contests began in 1935, over 1,000 yards or half a mile, on the Cam, on the Isis, and once on the Tideway at Barnes. Not until 2015 did the women race the full Championship Course, four miles and 374 yards from Putney to Mortlake.
1He found his boat in a field and sailed her around the world
On the tile: Joshua Slocum1895-1898
Joshua Slocum first met the Spray where she lay high and dry in a field beside New Bedford harbor: a worn-out oyster fishing vessel, 36 feet 9 inches long. He spent thirteen months and $553 rebuilding her. He left Boston on April 24, 1895, and anchored at Newport, Rhode Island in June 1898, three years, two months and two days and some 46,000 miles later, the first person known to have sailed around the world alone.
Bernard Moitessier had rounded Cape Horn and was still in the first solo nonstop race around the world when, in March 1969, he sealed a note in a film canister and fired it onto the deck of a tanker in Cape Town harbor with a slingshot. He was leaving the race, he wrote, to save his soul. Rather than turn north for Europe and the prize, he carried on east for a second circuit of the Southern Ocean and reached Tahiti 303 days after leaving England.
3The first woman around the world alone was a naval architect
On the tile: Liskiewicz1976-1978
Krystyna Chojnowska-Liskiewicz was a Polish naval architect, and the yacht she sailed was built for the voyage under her husband's direction. She left Las Palmas in the Canary Islands on March 28, 1976, crossed the Atlantic to Barbados, took the Panama Canal into the Pacific, and called at Tahiti and Australia before closing her circle in the middle of the Atlantic near the Cape Verde Islands on March 20, 1978. Naomi James completed the first women's solo circuit by way of Cape Horn that June.
Kay Cottee sailed out of Sydney on November 29, 1987, in a yacht renamed Blackmores First Lady for the sponsor who backed her. She came back through the same heads 189 days later, on June 5, 1988, the first woman to sail around the world alone, nonstop and without assistance. More than 100,000 people turned out to meet her. She was named Australian of the Year for 1988, and the voyage raised more than a million dollars for charity.
On February 7, 2005, Ellen MacArthur crossed her finish line off the French coast after 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds alone at sea. It was the fastest solo lap of the planet anyone had sailed, and it beat Francis Joyon's record by a day and eight hours. Her boat was a 75-foot Australian-built trimaran called B&Q. For ten weeks her only sleep had come in catnaps of about half an hour, taken between watches on deck.
Ernestine Bayer wanted to row. The clubs along Philadelphia's Schuylkill River would not have her, because she was a woman. Her husband Ernest rowed, and won an Olympic silver medal in 1928. In 1938 she led a group of women in founding the Philadelphia Girls' Rowing Club, and in her own telling, all hell broke loose on Boathouse Row. In 1967 she organized the first American women's eight to race internationally. Women rowed at the Olympics for the first time in 1976.
Henry Robert Pearce of Australia was rowing an Olympic quarterfinal at Amsterdam in 1928 when he looked over his shoulder and saw a duck crossing in front of him, followed by a small flotilla of ducklings. He leaned on his oars and waited until they were clear. His French opponent caught up and pulled away to a five-length lead. Pearce won the race anyway, then won the final and the gold medal, setting a Games record on the way.
8Gold at five straight Olympics, in three kinds of boat
On the tile: Steve Redgrave1984-2000
Steve Redgrave won a rowing gold medal at five consecutive Olympic Games, from Los Angeles in 1984 to Sydney in 2000. He took the first in a coxed four, the next three in a coxless pair, and the last in a coxless four alongside Matthew Pinsent, James Cracknell and Tim Foster. He was 38 years old on that final day, September 23, 2000. No other rower has won gold at five straight Games. He was knighted the following year.
9Four straight golds, and a bench he built to train on
On the tile: Elvstrøm1948-1960
Paul Elvstrøm of Denmark was 20 when he won his first Olympic gold medal, in the one-man Firefly class in 1948. He won again in the Finn in 1952, 1956 and 1960: four golds at four consecutive Games. To train on land he built a hiking bench with weights, to copy the strain of leaning out over the water, and he began making sails for his rivals, which grew into a business. In 1966 and 1967 he won world titles in seven different classes.
Nathanael Herreshoff built Reliance to exploit a rating rule that measured waterline length. Her overhangs ran nearly seven meters forward and almost eight aft, so when she heeled her effective waterline stretched from the regulated 27 meters to close to 40, and she went faster for it. She was just under 144 feet overall, carried about 16,000 square feet of sail and needed a crew of 64. She defended the America's Cup, and within a decade the Cup had adopted more conservative design rules.
Ben Lexcen designed Australia II with wings on the bottom of her keel, and it outperformed conventional keels in secret testing in the Netherlands. At the dock the crew draped tarpaulin modesty skirts over her sides every time she was lifted in or out of the water, so nobody could see what was down there. On the course she was fast enough to come back from 1-3 down in a best-of-seven. John Bertrand's crew won 4-3 and ended a 132-year American winning streak.
3Western red cedar, and the shell that won in Berlin
On the tile: Husky Clipper1936
Hiram Conibear recruited George Pocock from Vancouver in 1912 to build racing shells for the University of Washington. In 1927 he switched his planking from Spanish cedar to western red cedar, which was lighter, rot resistant and cut the cost of a shell in half. His Seattle company became the leading producer in the country, making 80 percent of the shells used by American college crews. For the 1936 Olympics he built an eight and christened her Husky Clipper; the Washington crew rowed her to gold at Grunau, ahead of Italy and Germany.
Before there were sliding seats, there was sliding. Tyneside professionals were shifting along their fixed seats in the 1850s and 1860s to get their legs into the stroke. J.C. Babcock of the Nassau Rowing Club in New York built a practical slide around 1870, and wrote that the best oarsmen in the world, the Tynesiders, already slid, and that he was doing mechanically what they did on their seats. A Tyne crew raced the new seats in November 1871, and British clubs followed.
For a century racing blades were symmetrical, shaped like long spoons. In 1991 Concept2 released an asymmetric blade, shorter and wider, with a squared-off top edge that made rowers call it a hatchet. It appeared to be one to two percent faster than what came before. In a sport decided by a second or two over 2,000 meters, that was plenty: the following summer the new blades were prominent at the Barcelona Olympics. Rowers still call them big blades, or cleavers.
In 1947 Major Clifford McKay told an Optimist service club in Clearwater, Florida, that the structure of the soap box derby could be adapted into a plan for a boy-sized sailboat. He asked a local builder, Clark Mills, for a boat costing $50 or less and made from two sheets of plywood. Mills said the only way to manage that was to give the boat a snub nose. He called it the Optimist pram, donated the design to the club, and never took a royalty.
Francis Sweisguth was a draftsman in William Gardner's naval architecture office when he drew the plans for the Star, a chine-built keelboat just under 23 feet long, sailed by two. Thirty-three of them were built over the winter of 1910-1911, twenty-two at Ike Smith's yard in Port Washington, New York. The class joined the Olympic program in 1932 and stayed on it through 2012, missing only 1976, when the Tempest replaced it. That is eighty years of Olympic racing, and 2012 was the last Games to carry keelboats at all.
The boat introduced for the 2021 America's Cup has no keel at all. The AC75 is a 75-foot monohull that stands up instead on twin canting T-foils: arms that swing out to windward, ballasted to give righting moment while sailing and stability at low speed. In normal sailing the leeward foil is lowered for lift and the windward arm lifts clear of the water, so the boat flies on one foil and a rudder. American Magic's Patriot has been clocked at 53.31 knots.
9One stop, 226 days, and a knighthood with Drake's sword
On the tile: Gipsy Moth IV1966-1967
Francis Chichester was 64 when he left Plymouth in August 1966 in a ketch named Gipsy Moth IV, bound around the world with a single stop at Sydney. He spent 226 days at sea. His self-steering gear failed, and a freak wave knocked the boat down. The Queen knighted him with the sword that had belonged to Sir Francis Drake, and he brought Gipsy Moth IV home to Buckler's Hard on September 17, 1967, his 66th birthday.
1The only tie, and the verdict the record does not have
On the tile: Dead Heat1877Myth busted
One Boat Race has ended in a tie. In bad weather in 1877 Oxford and Cambridge finished together in 24 minutes 8 seconds, and the Thames waterman judging the finish, John Phelps, called a dead heat. There were no finishing posts on the course that year. A famous version of his verdict, dead heat to Oxford by a few feet, has followed the race ever since, but the official results table gives no winner at all: it reads Dead Heat in both the winner and margin columns.
On March 30, 1912 the tidal Thames was rough enough to swamp both crews. Cambridge sank off the Harrods depository; Oxford filled with water, put in to empty the boat, then finished the course anyway. The umpire had already declared no race. The universities came back two days later, and Oxford won the re-row by six lengths. Before that day the race had seen exactly one sinking in eighty-three years, Cambridge in 1859. The official results table still carries the footnote: both crews sank in first race on 30th March.
One foot is the closest winning margin in the history of the Boat Race, and Oxford owns it. In 2003 the lead changed twice; Oxford came past Cambridge on the approach to Barnes Bridge and held off the sprint finish to win by that foot, about 30 centimeters, after four miles and 374 yards. Two days earlier a collision with the harbor master's launch broke the wrist of Cambridge's bowman, Wayne Pommen, and put him out of the boat. Two pairs of brothers raced against each other that day, on opposite sides, for the first time in the event's history.
4The first woman in the men's race steered the winners
On the tile: Sue Brown1981
For more than 150 years the men's Boat Race was rowed by men only. In 1981 Oxford named Sue Brown coxswain of their men's crew, the first woman to take part in it. A cox does not row: she steers, calls the rating and is the lightest person aboard. Brown had won the women's race for Oxford the year before. Oxford won by eight lengths in 1981, and won again in 1982 with Brown in the same seat. The results table marks 1981 with a note about her.
At the 1900 Paris Games the Dutch coxed pair noticed that French boats were carrying children in the cox's seat to save weight. Their own cox, Hermanus Brockmann, weighed about 60 kilograms. They found a boy at the course who weighed about 33, and had to bolt five kilograms of lead to the rudder so that it would sink. They won the final. Nobody recorded the boy's name or age. He survives in one photograph with the crew, and that is all.
6He gave up a medal to pull two sailors out of the sea
On the tile: Lemieux1988
On September 24, 1988, off Pusan, the wind at the Olympic regatta rose from 10 to 15 knots to more than 35. Lawrence Lemieux of Canada was lying second in his Finn race, on course for a medal, when he passed a capsized Singaporean 470. Shaw Her Siew was clinging to the hull; Joseph Chan was 20 meters off, too badly hurt to climb aboard. Lemieux pulled both in and held his boat against the wind until a patrol boat came. He was later awarded the Pierre de Coubertin medal.
7A yacht race where the lawyers did most of the racing
On the tile: Big Boat Case1988
In 1988 Michael Fay of New Zealand found a loophole in the century-old deed of gift and demanded an immediate America's Cup match, turning up with a 90-foot-waterline monohull. San Diego answered with something the deed did not forbid: a much smaller catamaran carrying a rigid wing sail. The catamaran was far faster and won the series easily. New Zealand went to court, won at first, then lost on appeal, because the deed says nothing about how many hulls a yacht may have.
Oracle Team USA began the 2013 America's Cup on minus two points. An international jury had docked them for illegal modifications to the smaller catamarans their team sailed in a warmup series, the heaviest penalty in the event's history. That meant Oracle had to win eleven races while New Zealand needed nine. New Zealand went ahead 8-1. Oracle then won the last eight races in a row, taking the deciding one on San Francisco Bay on September 25, and kept the trophy 9-8.
9A pair of lucky socks that a whole country copied
On the tile: Red Socks1995
Pippa Blake gave her husband Peter a different pair of socks for each of his campaigns, for luck. For the 1995 America's Cup the socks were red, and he wore them every time Black Magic went on the water. On one occasion he was injured and there were no red socks aboard, and that was the only race the boat lost in the whole campaign. The crew took up red socks, and so did New Zealanders, from the prime minister to bus drivers.