They say that sports are unfair to women, this is definitely not the case for Rowing, at least not in the United States.
In the NCAA there is a rule that states that there must be an equal amount of funding for women’s sports as there are for men’s sports. This rule does not apply in the CIS. In the US most universities and colleges have HUGE football teams and basketball teams because of the number of fans for these teams. With teams of well over a hundred people and the fact that they travel all over the country their respective schools must pay the same amount of money into women’s sports.
How do they do this? They create a huge number of womens sports where they put as many people as they can onto the team and then fully fund them with the most expensive equipment. In most American universities you will have women’s rowing teams with well over seventy members. Clemson University in South Carolina is one of these schools who reqruits any women that is able to row, just to increase their women spending. They have been to our team many times to try and take away members.
You do not need seventy members on a rowing team, you need eight, plus a few spares and a coxswain. No one cares about who wins the small boats, it’s all about who has the biggest and most powerful eight, basically it’s similar to the penis for the university. The only reason they race them is to show who is fastest as an individual so they can put the fastest eight people in a boat.
If you look at the olympics which races do people care about? The eight. These are the eight fastest people in the country put into one boat. The smaller boats are the spares, the people who weren’t fast enough to get into the eight. In fact the biggest race that people care about at the olympics is the Men’s Heavyweight Eight, which Canada won gold in last year.
But what about men at the university level? They do not get funding. These universities that have huge women’s rowing varsity teams, at best they will have a men’s rowing club, that’s it. There are a few exceptions to this such as Stanford and Berkeley and then Harvard and Yale.
So to be a man in the rowing world in the US is pretty hard. There’s no funding for you at the university level. It’s completely unfair and if we tried to argue it we would not win. Americans would rather see football or basketball than a rowing race, plus people (like Hilaire Ford) would argue that men already have everything else, so we should just suck it up.
Luckily in Canada the CIS does not have this rule and universities with a rowing team equally fund their teams. This again changes at the National Level. There the best Canadians will get at most $1,500 a month to live off of from the government to train, and that’s only to maybe the eight people in the eight. So if you want to be a national rower in Canada you will have to find a job that accommodates you being able to row two or three times a day, six days a week, because otherwise you won’t be able to pay for food.
At the national level in the US their athletes are fully funded so they do not need to work at all. They are able to fully dedicate themselves to their sport. I do not know how much they get per month but I do know it is more than enough to not need to work.
So when I go to 2012 I either need to become an American and have everything paid for, or I can convince the military to let me train with the national team, then they can say one of there members won gold in London.
One day we will have equality.
