Which stroke rate wins Olympic Gold?

Benedikt, August 9 2024

Is rowing at the highest possible average stroke rates above 40 strokes per minute faster than rowing at slightly lower average rates of around 38 strokes per minute? I analyzed data from all A finals from the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games to answer this question.

Photo of a rowing boat crossing the finish line in Paris. Copyright Swiss Rowing

World Rowing published the Olympic Game’s race data on their website (https://worldrowing.com/event/2024-olympic-games-regatta Documents Daily Results Summary Scroll down to see the list of boat classes, then click on "See Documents" for the boat class you want to see. The race data is then under the section "Race Documents"). For each race and boat, average speeds and rates for every 50 m are listed. Even though the data is not very precise as the values are averaged over 50 m and rounded to 0.1 m/s for speed and 1 stroke / min (only entire numbers, no decimal) for stroke rate, the data still gives unique insights into what each boat did.

For this analysis here, I took all final A events of all boat classes. There was a total of 24 different countries attaining at least a 6th rank. All 14 events were considered, resulting in a total of 84 boats.

Average Rates per Country

To start with, I computed the average stroke rate between 500 m and 1500 m for each boat. For each country, the average rate and rank across all its boats was computed. The figure below shows the result. Both graphs show the same data: the top graph has the countries sorted by average rate and the graph below by average rank.

Graphs showing the average rates by country and rank

Each box shows the mean stroke rate ± standard deviation. The whiskers mark one additional stroke rate standard deviation. The color of the box indicates the average rank with yellow having an average rank on 1 (i.e., gold) and dark blue of 6 (i.e., 6th place). The number above each whisker (R=...) is the average rank rounded to one decimal. The width of the box indicates how many boats were qualified for the A finals. The larger the width, the more boats. The number below each whisker (N=...) indicates this number of qualified boats.

Based on this data we can draw two main conclusions:

Every country appears to have its own target stroke rate with clear differences between nations. Poland, Romania, Norway, Spain, Italy all aim for very high average stroke rates of above 40 strokes per minute. Ireland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, Germany, United States, and Lithuania are in the middle field with average stroke rates between 38 and 40 strokes per minute. Great Britain, France, and China aim for lower stroke rates between 36 and 38 strokes per minute.
Ranking is not correlated to average stroke rates: among the most successful nations all average stroke rates are represented. Romania is on the high side, Netherlands in the middle, Great Britain on the lower end.

Digging Further

For me, this is a very surprising and interesting result. It is possible to win Olympic gold with stroke rates of well over 40 strokes per minute or with stroke rates slightly below 40 strokes per minute. To further exemplify this, I compared the women's and men's eight. Romania won the women's race with an extremely high stroke rate and Great Britain won the men's race with a considerably slower stroke rate. Both countries were present in both finals. For both boat classes, I toke the difference of the speed, stroke rate and distance per stroke with respect to the winner. The results are shown below. The gold line shows the actual values of the winning boat and the green and purple boxes below the difference to all the other boats computed for every 50 m.

In-depth performance analysis for the women's 8 boat

In-depth performance analysis for the men's 8 boat

What's also interesting to see in these graphs is the typical pacing strategy in rowing: start with an extremely high rate for the first 100 - 200 m, then gradually slow down until a plateau is reached at around 500 m. At around 1500 m stroke rates increase again for the final sprint. This is consistent among all nations and boat classes, regardless of their average target stroke rate between 500 m and 1500 m. The figure below shows the stroke rates of all boats zeroed by their average rate. Each thin grey line is one boat and the thick blue line the global average of all boats.

Zeroed average stroke rates for every 50 m for all boats

What now?

When the average stroke rate does not matter, what matters? Rowing power and efficiency. A crew should select the rate which is most comfortable for all rowers and then spend time on optimizing rowing efficiency (and power). With this official race data, unfortunately, it is not possible to give more insights for rowing efficiency. But with our rowing performance analysis product you can do it, during daily training and in real-time. Completely independent of us, without any expert.

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