![]() ![]() ![]() Professional rowers made a handsome living, and a rowing economy grew up around the sport, with regattas in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and steamboat and railroad companies ferrying enthusiasts to less-populated venues. ![]() In post-Civil War America, rowing was for a time the most popular spectator sport in the country. Among modern American spectator sports, rowing is right up there with badminton, dressage, or the luge - Olympic curiosities we might catch a glimpse of on television once every four years, but only if the runners, gymnasts, swimmers, and volleyball players all have the day off.Īsked to identify a rower by name, the best the average sports fan is likely to come up with is one of the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, onetime Harvard scullers portrayed in the movie “The Social Network” as a pair of blueblood snobs who famously let Mark Zuckerberg outmaneuver them for control of the social-media platform that becomes Facebook and are condemned to spend the rest of their lives whining about it while nonetheless becoming Bitcoin billionaires.īut, as author William Lanouette, who comes to his subject matter with the sensibilities of a onetime collegiate and club rower, instructs us in The Triumph of the Amateurs, it wasn’t always this way. ![]()
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