One part of their discussion - echoeing throughout the social media for the last few days - was the reorganization of the olympic program.
The shortest summary I can draw from the athletes' reactions is a collective "Are they crazy?" Honestly, this was my first thought, too, when I saw the three proposals concerning boat class changes for the olympic programme - all of them deleting the lightweight men's four, and two of them adding the women's four, an event which is for the moment likely to "die out" on the world rowing championships.
I've just read through the presentation on rule changes provided on worldrowing.com, trying to understand the reason for these proposals.
As far as I understand, FISA and IOC are aiming to establish gender balance by trying to offer exactly the same boat classes both for women and men. This is also reflected in proposals for a new world rowing championship program some slides later, which would delete all 2+ and 4+ events for the open weight, and add 2- and potentially 4- for lightweight women, so that they would have exactly the same events as the lightweight men. Another interesting "siede effect" of the new rules would be that in case a boat class "dies out" for one gender, it would kill the same boat class for the other gender as well.
Although I think I understand the idea behind, I can hardly imagine that equality and fairness are the same thing here.
I'm sure that we might face the question if the chicken or the egg was there first when discussing the topic, which is in this case: Are there not so many athletes for a specific boat class because it is not attractive, or are there only few entries for the boat class, because there aren't enough potential athletes for this boat?
First of all: Personally, I do not feel discriminated because I will never get the chance to race in a coxless four on the olympic games. From my point of view, it is absolutely okay that some gender/weight groups race in categories that other groups don't have. I think fairness and diversity would not be biased by say, letting the lightweight men race a four and lightweight women a quad - four persons in each boat, so what's the matter? To avoid confusion among the spectators, it might even be helpful to establish something like a big boats for open class - middle boats for lightweights - policy.
I'm convinced that removing the LM4- from the olympic program and adding sweep rowing for lightweight women only on the world rowing championships would just result in no lightweight sweep rowing. It is obvious that the not- olympic boat classes are the ones most likely to "die out", even more if in the same rowing style (sculling/ sweep rowing) there wouldn't be any olympic event.
In case we want to add a new - former not olympic - boat class, shouldn't we first have a look at what are actually the most popular not olympic boat classes on the world championships? Just by making the W4- olympic I honestly do not believe we will suddenly find a lot more top-class female sweep rowers. And would the dozens of lightweight women competing in the LW1x and LW4x think it was a fair decision to prefer the few open weight sweep rowers who did not make it to the eight or pair? Is it fair to take away the chance to compete on the olympic regatta from all male lightweight sweep rowers, just because you don't see the chance to offer the same to lightweight women?
