Prior to the beginning of the eighteenth century, organized popular sports did not exist in forms which would be recognizable today. The few professional athletes were solo performers in events which had no universally accepted rules, much less regulatory bodies, regular places or schedules of competition, uniforms, leagues, or established followings. Amateur sport was similarly in a nascent stage, especially with respect to team sports, for which the school, university, clubs, commercial and media structures which support them today had yet to evolve. Rowing was at the forefront of those sports which created the institutional infrastructure which characterizes modern amateur and professional sports.

For millennia, man has sat or stood in boats and pushed or pulled on an oar to propel the craft across a body of water for reasons of commerce, transportation or war. Rowing has also provided a basis for competition and entertainment from antiquity, but it began to acquire the characteristics of a modern sport in the early eighteenth century. It was then, in 1715, that Thomas Doggett, an Irish playwright and actor, established in London an annual regatta for professional watermen entering their first year of apprenticeship. He provided in his will for a prize of a suit of livery and a silver arm badge for the winner of the contest, which has been held virtually continuously ever since.

Organized amateur boat racing had its origins about a century later at Eton College, where groups of students rented or purchased boats for recreational rows and occasional races along the Thames at Windsor. While details are hard to come by, the activity appears to have spread to Westminster School in London and Oxford and Cambridge Universities by 1820. The first intercollegiate boat race took place mid-1829 between Oxford and Cambridge, and the first interscholastic contest, between Eton and Westminster, occurred several weeks later.

The appeal of rowing as an amateur sport beyond school and college years led to the formation of boat clubs in London, including the Leander Club in 1818. The next two decades witnessed a rapid geographical growth of the sport, principally through the establishment of amateur non-scholastic boat clubs throughout England and the United States, where New York and Philadelphia each boasted several clubs by 1840. The predominant activity and focus of such clubs tended to be social. Dinners and picnics were a regular part of club events in which women were welcome.

The first regattas were established in England in the 1830s, typically organized by a committee of citizens and tradesmen of a town with the hope of attracting spectators who would patronize local hotels and taverns during their stay. The most famous of these, the Henley Royal Regatta, was first held in 1839, and, with the exception of war years, has been an annual fixture in the amateur rowing world ever since.

With the evolution of rowing as a sport came the development of better boats and equipment. Initial advances in rowing technology were confined to minor tailoring of lap-strake built keeled boats with oarlocks mounted on the gunwales. Crews ordered them from boat builders whose principal business was in supplying boats to professional watermen and for general purposes. The first major advance in rowing technology came from the watermen of Newcastle on Tyne, who introduced iron outriggers to racing shells in the early 1840s. Then, in 1854, Matt Taylor built a smooth-hulled keel-less craft was significantly lighter than the overlapping plank keeled designs that had preceded it.

By this date, boat racing had captured a prominent place in the public eye in Great Britain. The Henley Royal Regatta had expanded to nine events and the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators to the four-mile course between Mortlake and Putney.

Of equal interest was the emergence of numerous professional scullers who claimed the championship of a river, or eventually, a nation or the world, and then raced challengers before enormous crowds. While there was also professional racing in pairs and fours, the single scullers seemed to have attracted the most attention both in Great Britain and the United States.

Amateur boat racing in America achieved a major milestone with the 1852 boat race between Yale and Harvard on Lake Winnipesaukee, the first intercollegiate athletic event in the United States. As in England, the teams were formed and run by students, without any faculty or administration funding or control, and the university ("varsity") crew was selected from the various boat clubs within the school. Students at other colleges now organized rowing as well as other sports, such as "base ball", and "athletics" (or track and field), which were the beginnings of what today have become an integral part of college life.

Regattas were held in the United States from at least the 1850s on, but none achieved the fame or stability of Henley. They were sometimes sponsored by local railroad lines seeking to attract weekend business, both by transporting people to regatta sites and by running a spectator train along the bank of the river or lake course during the races.

Perhaps no single event was as responsible for the explosive growth of interest in rowing as the Harvard-Oxford race between coxed fours on the Thames in 1869, the first international intercollegiate athletic contest. The impact of publicity for this event was spectacular. Ninety two boat clubs existed in the U.S. in 1868; 138 new clubs were formed in the next two years. The National Association of Amateur Oarsmen (now the United States Rowing Association), one of the first national sport regulatory organizations in the United States, was established in 1872.

The third major development in rowing technology, the sliding seat, was contributed by an American sculler about 1870, completing the basic parameters of rowing equipment that shape and define the sport today. It was quickly incorporated into team boats on both sides of the Atlantic, making its first appearance in the Yale-Harvard race and at Henley in 1872, and in the Oxford-Cambridge race in 1873. Refinements such as swivel oarlocks and fully buttoned oars were still in the future, as well as advances in hull and oar design and in the materials available for boat and oar construction.

Perhaps the culminating event for the American rowing scene in the 1870s was the inclusion of rowing as one of two sports (the other was riflery) represented in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where international races were held in singles and fours. Rowing was enjoying comparable popularity in Great Britain. While competition at the collegiate level had not spread much beyond Oxford and Cambridge, it was enormously popular at the intramural level at those universities, where dozens of eights would take to the river twice a year for bumping races that decided head of the river honors. The constant competition and interchange of training methods and equipment enjoyed by this concentration of oarsmen, many of whom rowed before university at schools like Eton and Westminster, was a major factor in maintaining the primacy of Oxford and Cambridge oarsmen in the amateur rowing world into the beginning of the twentieth century.

Nowhere was this superiority as visible as at Henley which, along with Ascot and Wimbledon, was one of the premier sporting fixtures of the English summer social season. Although 55 non-United Kingdom crews challenged English rowing between 1870 and 1900, only four of them, two American (Columbia in the Visitors in 1878, and Ten Eyck in the Diamonds in 1897) and two Dutch, left with trophies.

The significance of amateur boat-racing on the national sporting scenes in the U.S. and Great Britain in the 1870s and 1880s was paralleled by public interest in professional boat racing, but with quite different results. The increasing ease of international transport and communication, combined with the growing appeal of sports contests as popular entertainment, had encouraged professional scullers to race for the various professional titles throughout the English-speaking world. A tremendous amount of money was bet on professional sculling contests of the era. This encouraged acts of sabotage and fixed races which, exacerbated by a growing emphasis on the concept of "amateurism" in rowing circles, diminished the popularity of professional rowing significantly by the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, the pre-eminent oarsmen in the rowing world were the English amateurs. But the rest of the world was catching up. Rowing had followed the British Empire throughout the English-speaking world, and had enjoyed popularity as both a competitive and recreational activity in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century. It nevertheless came as a shock to the English when the symbol of amateur rowing supremacy, the Henley Grand Challenge Cup, was won by Belgian eights in 1906, 1907 and 1909, amid dire predictions of the death of the sport, and again was taken abroad by Australia in 1912 and the Harvard junior varsity crew in 1914.

The extraordinary casualties suffered by the young men of the British upper class in World War I were reflected in the surge to prominence in international rowing after the war of crews and individuals from around the world. At the same time the Olympic Games, in which rowing was on the program in 1896, though it was not contested until 1900, began to share the spotlight with Henley as the world's premier rowing regatta.

The modern era following the Great War also saw the rise to prominence of a number of amateur and professional sports that displaced rowing as one of America's most popular sports. On the high school and collegiate level, football, baseball, and track and field, which required no lake or river or investment in boats and boathouses, were played almost universally in the fall and spring, with winter sports varying from boxing to indoor track to gymnastics and basketball. Baseball had also come to the fore as a professional team sport with organized leagues, schedules and championships. Football followed, to be joined in turn by basketball and hockey. These and other sources of entertainment found new audiences through radio broadcasts that reached into most American households by World War II. The outcome of the Yale-Harvard boat race, once front page fare, was buried in the sports section, if carried at all.

The nadir of interest in rowing in the United States in the late 1960s intersected with a leap in the caliber of European crews to standards never previously attained in rowing. U.S. eights had won the gold at every Olympics from 1920 to 1956, and again in 1964. That a scruffy, scrappy Harvard eight failed to win any medal at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City said something about the state of American rowing, but it said even more about advances in national team selection and training in rowing at the international level.

At the same time that U.S. rowing has struggled to cope with a highly competitive international environment, it is broadening its domestic base impressively. The sport experienced a modest growth in youth and women's rowing after World War II, but it was the confluence of several factors that fueled the explosion of interest in rowing in this country over the last two decades: the recognition that a broader base and more focused approach was critical for achieving international success; awareness of the appeal and suitability of rowing across age, weight and gender groups, which was enhanced to some degree by the coeducation in the late 1960s and 1970s of a number of prominent men's rowing schools; acknowledgement of the health value of rowing, in the midst of increasing awareness of the importance of fitness; the availability of a wide range of affordable and durable boats fit for various levels of recreation and competition during an era of general national prosperity; and the efforts of the United States Rowing Association and the National Rowing Foundation to promote the sport, aided by an influx of corporate sponsors.

Of all these developments, the expansion in women's rowing has had the most dramatic impact on the sport in the last quarter century. Interest among women at the high school, college and club levels has changed the face of rowing to where almost 40 percent of active rowers in the U.S. today are women. Women's rowing has been part of the Olympics since 1976. The 1,000 meter course has given way to the same 2,000 meter distance as the men row, and U.S. women have proved as or more successful than their male counterparts in the international arena in recent years.

Finally, the battle for inclusivity in rowing has opened the gates to lightweights at the Olympics for the first time, in Atlanta in 1996.

As a result of this ongoing "democratization," although it has but a fraction of the relative national spectator appeal and public recognition that it boasted over a century ago, the first modern sport now enjoys the greatest number and diversity of participants that it has ever known.

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