Czechs, Poles Head for Karapiro

The teams of the Czech Republic and Poland set for Karapiro, New Zealand, the scene of this year's World Rowing Championships. Four Czech and three Polish boats are going to fight for medals.

Czech rowing will be represented in men's and women's categories by singles and doubles. The Poles are sending women's doubles (standard and lightweight) and men's eight. The nominations have been announced on the websites of the national rowing bodies of both countries.

The Polish team left Warsaw on 14 October as confirmed on the personal website of Magdalena Kemnitz who rows in the bow seat of lightweight women's double.

According to the Czech Rowing Association website, the Czech rowers will fly from Prague on 16 October evening. They will join their team fellow Mirka Knapková, the women's single sculler who has already been in New Zealand since late September. Knapková was the first athlete to arrive at the World Championships venue, the websites of the FISA and the Czech Rowing Association have reported.

Karsten to Be the Only Belarusian at World Champs

Belarus is due to be represented in the upcoming World Rowing Championships by a single athlete – the indefatigable woman sculler Ekaterina Karsten (Екатерина Карстен). The selection was announced by the country’s head rowing coach Uladzimyr Sinelshchykau (Уладзімір Сінельшчыкаў; Russian spelling Vladimir Sinelshchikov, Владимир Синельщиков) in the Belarusian Sport Panorama newspaper published in Russian. The interview with Sinelshchykau was posted on the newspaper’s website on 14 September and quoted by the Belarusian website Goals.by.

Sinelshchykau’s soundbites largely identical with those in the Sport Panorama interview appeared on the Poland Rowing Association website on 3 October.

The reasons for not sending more crews from Belarus to the World Championships are mainly financial, the coach suggested.

First Full-Fledged European Championships... Finally

The upcoming European Rowing Championships in Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal are due to be much different from the previous years: for the first time since the championships were restored in 2007, Europeans get the opportunity to compete in all rowing events (not just the fourteen Olympic ones) and, unlike the past years again, most of the European rowing elite will really be present.

Rowing is a part of Europe's history. Source: Wikipedia.

The new history of the European Rowing Championships is problematic: the regatta was always held after the World Championships or Olympic Games and thus remained overshadowed by the real peak of the season. Many of the best European rowers did not bother to come – either because they already wanted to relax, or because they knew their main rivals would also stay home, or because they had anyway accomplished success on the world level for that season (European countries won 57% of rowing events at the 2008 Olympics and 70% of all events at the 2009 World Championships). Take Great Britain, one of the superpowers of rowing: two years ago, they sent seven boats to the European championships; last year, there was only one British boat.

In their current shape, the European Rowing Championships have largely become a regatta for: 1) reserve crews, 2) hopeful juniors, 3) experimental lineups, and 4) consolation prize seekers, i.e. those who might not be satisfied with their performance in the preceding World Championships or Olympic Games (see below for examples).

My Nomination of Vaclav Chalupa for the 2010 Thomas Keller Medal

I sent the following text to the FISA as a nomination proposal on 9 March 2010, the closing date for submissions. Chalupa's nomination as a finalist for this year's Thomas Keller Medal was finally published on the FISA web on 3 June and included quotes from my proposal as well as from someone else's submission. It was good to see that more people took the initiative to support Chalupa. Please, read further if you want to remember the highlights of this Czech man's life with rowing.

Main dates of the career:
1989-1993, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2007, 2009


Czech rower Vaclav Chalupa in 2009, the last year of his performance career. Source: YouTube screen grab.

1. Success at the international level, e.g. medal count taking level of competition into account:

Vaclav Chalupa Jr. (whose father, Vaclav Chalupa Sr., finished fifth in coxed pair in the 1964 Olympics) officially announced retirement from rowing after last year's world championships in Poznan, Poland. A Czech daily has characterised Chalupa's rowing career as going “from silver to silver” in a reference to the medals he took in his first (1989) and last (2009) senior world championships. During that time, Chalupa collected one Olympic silver (1992), five silver and three bronze medals from world championships (silver: 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 2009; bronze: 1995, 1998, 2001), and one gold from European championships (2007), in addition to four fourth places at world championships (1999, 2002, 2003, 2005). He has competed at six Olympic Games, from Seoul 1988 to Beijing 2008.