Celebrating 25 years of indoor rowing

Charles River All-Star Has Beens, CRASH-B’s, was born and since then indoor rowing competitions have boomed throughout the world. Now just about every rowing nation holds a national competition and a whole new breed of indoor rowers have risen ? ones that have never taken a stroke on the water.

This year CRASH-B’s celebrates its 25th anniversary on Saturday 25 February with over 2,000 ?ergers? racing as fast as they can over the 2,000 metre standard distance.

A long way from the roots of the competition in 1982, the original CRASH-B’s had barely 20 participants.

Original participant and Olympic gold medallist, Carie Graves remembers the first competition: ?The CRASH-Bs gave those of us in Boston a way to race together as men and women, heavy and lightweight and to hang out together for a few sweat laden beer drenched hours while the Charles (River) was frozen.?

Graves describes the first erg as basically a sit down bicycle. ?It had bicycle gears – five I believe – which one had to change manually by holding the top and bottom of the chain, pulling it forward to create enough slack to lift the chain up off one gear and move it onto another. It was not uncommon to see someone jump up off a machine during a piece to change the gear load.?

?We didn’t have a Jumbo Tron but did have coxswains standing in front of each machine with a white flag on a stick. They would initially hold the flag aloft, drop it after the first mile upon a signal from the coxswain, and raise the flag upon completion of the second mile etc., until the race was over.?

?The excitement in part was because the race was quite ‘camp’ with the coxswains and flags and ‘camp’ in the funny rower kind of way of: ?what are we thinking, why are we voluntarily hurting ourselves so much? What else can you do but laugh and have fun,? recall Graves.

Graves will race again this year in the 50 – 54 category.

Also a long-term CRASH-Ber, Kirk Bargerhuff, who has moved into organising rather than competing, remembers the tongue-in-cheek original steward positions including, master of mayhem and chairman of coxwains, beer and parking to name a few.

?What is particularly important is that half of the original budget was spent on beer!? remembers Bargerhuff.  

The prize, a hammer, is still presented today to the winner and this year an international line up includes Dutch lightweight Gerard van der Linden going up against Italy’s lightweight world record holder, Elia Luini.

Great Britain’s Graham Benton came from an indoor rowing background and has now found his way into a boat. He will race in the men’s open event taking on top US single sculler Wyatt Allen.

Racing starts at 8.00am EST and live race webcast can be seen on www.crash-b.org

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