Talk:Rowing at the 1972 Summer Olympics

the wrong way round
I've just written the article 1972 New Zealand eight and was surprised to find that compared to my very detailed source, the men’s eight article lists the Kiwi rowers in the wrong order. The bow and stroke are swapped, and all the seats in between are equally transposed. I see that the WP article is consistent with the FISA database. Digging further, it's the original official Olympic Report that’s also got them in that wrong order. Maybe the good people at FISA simply copied from the official document? I therefore wondered whether the official report is consistent in its erroneous listings. I’ve looked for strokes in other teams. First up, Sports Reference reports that Lawrence Terry was the stroke for the USA (note, though, that the Americans swapped seats between the heat and semi-final according to the official record). East German media reported that Borzym was their stroke (“Schlagman”; note registration needed for that source) at the July regatta at Rotsee, but I couldn’t find any Olympic reporting on their seat allocations. The German WP entry for Reinhard Wendemuth mentions that he was stroke, but it’s not supported by an inline reference. I couldn’t find anything about the Soviet Union or Poland. But four out of six examples where I did find something suggest that the official record is consistently the wrong way round.

That’s just for the coxed eight; I haven’t checked how the other boat classes check out. Does anybody know more about it? Shall we reverse the order of the eight rowers to what is shown in the source?  Schwede 66  00:07, 3 January 2018 (UTC)


 * The official report seems to list the crews in the opposite order in the later rounds compared with with how they've listed them for the earlier rounds. Looking at the GBR fours it seems that the order is listed correctly for heats and reps but reversed for semi and finals. In those days, of course, many nations did number crew positions from stroke to bow, rather than vice versa. --David Biddulph (talk) 19:47, 3 January 2018 (UTC)