Congrats to our 8 World Champions!

Congratulations to our rowing customers who, in a total of 23 races, won 21 medals. 8 of these were gold! Without going further into detail, we can state that the majority of the top 5 teams are customers of Archinisis. This shows once again that the world’s best teams rely on Archinisis - and it is precisely this reliance on objective performance feedback that helps them stay at the top.

Our customers recorded every race with our rowing sensor system, capturing detailed insights into their performance. They gained the full picture: from 50 m split times, to precise stroke-by-stroke parameters, and even detailed boat speed and acceleration patterns measured 200 times per second. The data was available in real time, enabling analysis from home and allowing complete race reports to be generated even before the boats were back on shore.

Official Race Data

While we cannot share our customers' race data, we performed an analysis based on the official data provided by World Rowing, which includes average speed and stroke rate every 50 m. For the Paris Olympics, our focus was on how stroke rate and speed evolve throughout the race and how they differ between nations. This time, we concentrated on comparing the different boat classes. To ensure consistency, we used the steady‑state phase - conservatively defined as the section between 750 m and 1500 m - for all boats across all finals.

How 500 m times vary between boat classes

Figure 1: Distribution of 500 m times for the different boat classes. The box shows the interquartile range with the thick black line indicating the median. The whiskers mark the 1.5x interquartile range. Only data from finals and between 750 m to 1500 m was taken.

With the exception of single sculls compared to pairs, a higher number of rowers generally results in faster speeds (i.e., lower 500 m times). The pattern is consistent across men and women, with women’s 500 m times typically 5–10 seconds slower for the same boat class.

How stroke rates vary between boat classes

Figure 1: Distribution of stroke rates for the different boat classes. The box shows the interquartile range with the thick black line indicating the median. The whiskers mark the 1.5x interquartile range. Only data from finals and between 750 m to 1500 m was taken.

Stroke rate showed no clear overall differences. Within the same boat class, women tended to row at slightly lower rates than men. During the steady‑state phase, stroke rates were similar between sculling and sweeping, unlike the start and finish sprints where differences are more pronounced. Linking back to the speed data, stroke rate itself did not correlate with boat speed. The observed speed differences could instead be explained by greater input power from more rowers and by variations in drag resulting from different boat shapes and weights.