St. Catharine’s alive with master’s rowers

St Catharines’ Martindale Pond, the home of the Royal Canadian Henley Regatta and the 1999 World Rowing Championships, is well equipped for the fast pace of the masters regatta that has 1000m races coming down the course at three to four minute intervals.

The weather was not completely kind this year with two of the four days disrupted by strong wind. Friday’s racing was delayed by 90 minutes due to thunderstorms, while Saturday had to cancel the afternoon’s events. Still, with competitors entered in multiple events, everyone got their fair share of racing, even those on the organising committee.

The regatta attracted 35 countries with over 8180 seats being raced. This included the ever-popular Sunday of mixed racing. Regatta co-chair George Darte said entries were way up for these races in doubles, quads and eights that are able to be entered right up to two days before. As a one euro donation per seat goes to junior rowing development, over 8000 Euros were raised for the fund.

Masters crew classification is divided into age groups starting at ‘A’ (27 to 35 years) and going through to ‘J’ (80 years and over). The biggest field was for the men’s ‘D’ single (50 to 54 years) with 93 singles entered although the event ended up being one of the causalities of the weather and was cancelled.  Regatta co-chair, Phil Jones entered along in this event.

“How many regatta chairs are able to row in their regatta and also win a couple of very competitive events?” said Jones. “My crew won gold in the men’s ‘D’ eight and men’s ‘D’ four against some very good crews. Our fours time was also the fastest overall and this crew was made up entirely of former Canadian national lightweight team members.”

Overall there were 1404 men’s entries, 1015 women’s entries and 424 mixed entries. The average age for the men was 54 and 48 for the women. Charles Eugster (SUI) was the oldest competitor at 91 years old followed by Emery Lang (Can), 89. Amongst the women Nelly Brandsma (AUS) was the oldest at 85, followed by Marjorie Burgard (USA), 81.

Regatta co-chair, George Darte, who had seven events to race, admitted that no medals came his way. “The quality of racing was absolutely exceptional,” said Darte. “I think it’s getting harder to win these damn medals. I think people are training harder.”

One feature of the regatta is a boat hire service so that rowers do not have to bring their own boats with them. “The service worked very well,” said Darte. “We had a lot of cooperation from Fluidesign, Swift, Concept2 and provincial clubs helped out from as far away as Buffalo New York.”
In 2011, the World Rowing Masters Regatta will go to Poznan, Poland, from 8 to 11 September.