CHAPTER XVII. A RECENT CONTROVERSY: ARE ATHLETES HEALTHY?--MR. SANDOW'S VIEWS ON THE TRAINING OF OARSMEN.
It would not be right, I think, to send forth a new book on rowing without referring to the controversy that has recently been carried on in the columns of the St. James's Gazette under the general title of "Are Athletes Healthy?" The discussion, which concerned itself mainly with oarsmen, is naturally of very deep interest, not only to them, but to the fathers and mothers who are anxious about the welfare of their energetic sons, and who, if the charges alleged against rowing can be proved, will, of course, do their best to dissuade their offspring from indulging in this pernicious exercise. I should have preferred to discuss the matter in the earlier chapters of this book, but the printing was already so far advanced as to render this course out of the question, and I am therefore compelled to deal with it somewhat out of its place in this final chapter.
It would be idle to deny that there was some reason for beginning this discussion. Within the past two years three magnificent young oarsmen, Mr. H. B. Cotton, Mr. T. H. E. Stretch, and Mr. E. R. Balfour, have died; the first after an illness of six months' duration, the other two after being ill for less than a fortnight. They were all Oxford men, had rowed in victorious races both at Putney and at Henley, and two of them—Mr. Cotton and Mr. Balfour—had been actually rowing and racing till within a short time of the attack that proved fatal to them. Mr. Stretch had not raced, except in scratch Eights at Putney, since the Henley Regatta of 1896, some ten months before he died.
It has been asserted that these three untimely deaths were due directly to the severe strain undergone both in preparation for racing and in the actual races in which these oarsmen took part, and that had they been content with unathletic lives they might have lived on for many years. Can that be proved? I admit that I do not wish to think the allegation capable of proof, for these three were my familiar friends. I had coached and trained them all; with two of them I had rowed in several races; I had spent innumerable happy days in their society, and the sorrow I feel in having lost them would be terribly increased if I were forced to believe that our favourite sport had had any part in hastening their end. In these cases I will confine myself to stating facts within my own knowledge, and will leave those who read my statement to say whether on a fair view of the matter the exercise of rowing can be held blameworthy.
I may begin by saying that it is the invariable rule at Oxford to send all men who may be required for the University Eight to undergo a preliminary medical examination. This examination is no perfunctory one. It is conducted by Mr. H. P. Symonds, a gentleman of very wide experience, especially amongst undergraduates, and I have known several instances in which, owing to his report, an oarsman has had to withdraw temporarily from the river, and has lost his chance of wearing the coveted blue. There has never been any question about yielding to Mr. Symonds's judgment. His verdict, if adverse, has always been accepted as final both by the oarsman concerned and by the president of the Boat Club. In all the three cases with which I am dealing, Mr. Symonds passed his men as perfectly sound in heart and lungs and in every other organ.
I take the case of Mr. Stretch first, in order to eliminate it conclusively. The cause of his death was appendicitis, followed by severe blood-poisoning. It is quite impossible to connect this painful and malignant illness with rowing or with any other exercise. The appendix vermiformis, which is the seat of the disease, is an unaccountable relic in the internal organization of human beings; it is liable to be affected mysteriously and suddenly in the young and the old, and the only effective remedy, I believe, is by means of an operation which removes it altogether. Mr. Stretch had, as I said, not trained and raced for ten months, and up to the moment of his illness had been in the enjoyment of robust and almost exceptional health.
Mr. Cotton, whose case I now proceed to consider, was an Eton boy, and had rowed a great deal during his school days, though he had not been included in the Eton crew at Henley. He was a man of small stature, beautifully built and proportioned, well-framed, muscular, strong, and active. On coming to Oxford he continued his rowing, and being a good waterman and a man of remarkable endurance and courage, he was in his second year placed at bow of the University crew. Altogether he rowed in four victorious Oxford crews, he won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley twice as bow of a Leander crew, he won the Stewards' Cup in a Magdalen College Four, rowed Head of the River three times, besides taking part in many other races more or less important. During his whole rowing career I knew him to be unwell only once, and that was in 1893, when he suffered from a sore throat at Putney. In 1895 he rowed bow of the Oxford Eight for the fourth time. The training of this crew was a very anxious one. Influenza was very prevalent, and one after another the Oxford men were affected by this illness. There were only two exceptions, and one of these was Mr. Cotton, who was never sick or sorry for a single day during the whole period of practice. Shortly after the race he came to stay with me. He was then perfectly strong, perfectly healthy, and in wonderfully good spirits, and showed not the least sign of being stale or exhausted. He told me himself, on my congratulating him on having escaped the influenza, that he had never felt better or stronger in his life than he did at that time. On the Easter Monday he bicycled from Bourne End to Oxford and back (a distance of nearly seventy miles as he rode it), and, as he had had to battle against a strong cold wind on the return journey, he was very tired on his arrival. On the following morning, however, he appeared perfectly well. Towards the end of that week he complained of feeling "very lackadaisical and having a bad headache," but he attached no importance to these symptoms, and soon after went back to Oxford with a view to rowing in the Magdalen Eight. The tired feeling and the headache, however, continued, and eventually got so bad that he had to take to his bed with a high temperature and all the other symptoms of violent influenza. This illness, neglected at the outset, almost immediately settled on his lungs, both of which were congested with pneumonia. Owing, as Mr. Symonds himself told me, to his good general condition and his great strength, he fought through this, but in the mean time signs of consumption had declared themselves, and of this he died at Davos Platz in the following October.
With regard to Mr. Balfour, the facts are these: He was a man of Herculean build and strength. He played in the Oxford Rugby Union Football team for two years, 1894 and 1895. In 1896 and in this year he rowed in the University Eight, and last July he rowed at Henley in the Leander Eight, and won the pair-oared race with Mr. Guy Nickalls. I can answer for it that during all his races he was absolutely fit and well. I saw him daily at Henley, and, though I knew him to be strong and healthy, I was surprised not merely by his improvement in style, but by the great vigour he displayed in rowing. On the morning after the Regatta I saw him for the last time. He was then in splendid health and spirits. On the 12th of August he shot grouse; on the following day, in very cold wet weather, he went out fishing, and came home wet through, complaining of a chill. On the following day he took to his bed in a high fever, with both lungs congested. The illness next attacked his kidneys, and soon after his life was despaired of. However, he rallied in an extraordinary way until symptoms of blood-poisoning declared themselves, when he rapidly sank, and died on August 27th. Now, this illness was due either to an ordinary chill or to influenza, or, as I have since heard, primarily to blood-poisoning, caused by leaky and poisonous drains at a place where he had been staying before his shooting excursion. A subsequent examination of these drains revealed a very bad condition of affairs immediately underneath the room that Mr. Balfour had occupied. In any case it does not appear—and the strong testimony of the doctors who attended him confirms me in this—that Mr. Balfour's death was due to his rowing. But an objector may say, "It is true that neither in Mr. Cotton's nor in Mr. Balfour's case can death be directly attributed to rowing; their exertions, however, so exhausted their strength, the soundness of their organs, and their powers of resistance to disease, that when they were attacked they became easy victims." To this I oppose (1) the report of Mr. H. P. Symonds, who examined both these oarsmen before they rowed in their University Eights; (2) my own observation of their health, condition, and spirits during practice, in their races, and afterwards when the races were over; and (3) the reports of the doctors who attended them during their last illnesses, and who declared (I speak at second hand with regard to Mr. Balfour, at first hand with regard to Mr. Cotton) that they were both, when struck down, in a surprising state of strength, due to the exercise in which they had taken part, and that in both cases their powers of resistance were far greater than are usually found. Do I go too far in asserting that any doctor in large practice could find in his own experience for each of these two cases at least twenty cases in which non-rowing and non-athletic men have been suddenly carried off by the same sort of illness? I am not concerned to prove that rowing confers an immunity from fatal illness: my point is that in the two cases I have considered, and in all cases where it is pursued under proper conditions of training and medical advice, rowing does not in any way promote a condition favourable to disease.
I pass from these particular cases, the discussion of which has been painful to me, to the general question of health amongst the great mass of those who have been, or are, active rowing men. It may be remembered that some twenty-five years ago Dr. J. H. Morgan, of Oxford, moved to his task by a controversy similar to that which has recently taken place, instituted a very careful inquiry into the health of those who had taken part in the University Boat-race from 1829 to 1869. Their number amounted, if I remember rightly, to 294, of whom 255 were alive at the date of the inquiry. Of these 115 were benefited by rowing, 162 were uninjured, and only in 17 cases was any injury stated to have resulted. And it must be remembered that this inquiry covered a period during which far less care, as a general rule, was exercised both as to the selection and the training of men than is the case at the present day. I may add my own experience. Since I began to row, in 1874, I have rowed and raced with or against hundreds of men in college races and at regattas, and I have watched closely the rowing of very many others in University and in Henley crews. I have kept in touch with rowing men, both my contemporaries and my successors, and amongst them all I could not point to one (putting aside for the moment the three special cases I have just discussed) who has been injured by the exercise, or would state himself to have been injured. On the contrary, I can point to scores and scores of men who have been strengthened in limb and health—I say nothing here of any moral effect—by their early races and the training they had to undergo for them. I could at this moment pick a crew composed of men all more than thirty years old who are still, or have been till quite recently, in active rowing, and, though some of them are married men, I would back them to render a good account of themselves in Eight or Four or Pair against any selection of men that could be made. Nay more, in any other contests of strength or endurance I believe they would more than hold their own against younger athletes, and would overwhelm any similar number of non-athletes of the same or any other age. As contests I should select a hard day's shooting over dogs, cross-country riding, tug-of-war, boxing, long-distance rowing, or, in fact, any contest in which the special element of racing in light ships has no part. For such contests I could pick, not eight, but eighty men well over thirty years old, and if the limit were extended to twenty-four years of age I could secure an army. Is there any one who doubts that my rowing men would knock the non-athletes into a cocked hat? For it must be remembered that the bulk of rowing men are not exclusively devoted to oarsmanship. A very large proportion of those that I have known have been good all-round sportsmen.
As to the general effect of rowing on strength and health I may perhaps be pardoned if I cite my own case, not because there is anything specially remarkable in it, but because it bears on some of the questions that have been raised, and I can speak about it with certainty. In early childhood I had a serious illness which considerably retarded my physical development. At school, however, I took my part in all sports, played three years in the Cricket XI. and in the Football XV., and won several prizes at the athletic sports. I went to Cambridge in 1874, when I was three months short of nineteen, and immediately took to rowing. I was certainly not a particularly strong boy then, though I had a fair share of activity. I rowed persistently in Eights, Fours and Pairs, at first with labour and distress, but gradually, as time went on, with ease and pleasure, and I found that the oftener I rowed the greater became my powers of endurance. I ought to add that I never rowed in the University Race, but I have borne my share in thirty-six bumping races, as well as in numerous other races ranging in distance from three-quarters of a mile to three miles. I believe that the six consecutive races of a May Term call for endurance at least as great as the single race from Putney to Mortlake. My actual muscular strength, too, increased very largely, and has ever since maintained itself unimpaired. I have found that this exercise has, in fact, strengthened and consolidated me all round; and I can think of no other exercise that could have had upon me the same salutary effect that I am justified in attributing mainly to rowing—an effect which has enabled me to endure great exertion, sometimes in extremes of heat or of cold, without the smallest ill result, and has brought me to middle age with sound organs, a strong constitution, active limbs, and a good digestion. There are hundreds of other men who could, I doubt not, give a similar account of themselves.
Out of this main discussion on the health of athletes there sprang a subsidiary one, which proved of even greater interest to rowing men. It was started by Mr. Sandow, the eminent weight-lifter and modern representative of Hercules. Mr. Sandow, stimulated by a disinterested love for his fellow-men in general, and for those of Cambridge University in particular, wrote an article in the St. James's Gazette in which he put forward his own peculiar views on the proper system for the training of athletes. He ended by declaring that if he were allowed to train a Cambridge crew according to his system (it being understood that rowing instruction was at the same time to be imparted to them by a properly qualified teacher), he would guarantee to turn out a crew the like of which had never before sat in a boat. We were to infer, though this was at first sight not obvious, that this crew would easily defeat an Oxford crew trained on a system which Mr. Sandow evidently considered to be absurd and obsolete.
According to Mr. Sandow's system, as he subsequently developed it, the members of this crew were to have complete license in all things. They were to eat what they liked, drink what they liked, smoke as much as they liked, and, in fact, make their own good pleasure the supreme law of their existence. All that Mr. Sandow stipulated was that for some two hours a day during a period of several months these men were to put themselves in Mr. Sandow's hands for the purpose of muscular development all round according to the methods usually employed by him. Any spare energy that might then remain to them might be devoted to the work of rowing in the boat.
Now, in the first place, there are certain elementary difficulties which would go far to prevent the adoption of this experiment. The crew is not selected several months before the race; and even if it were, it would be practically impossible for the men composing it to spare the time required by Mr. Sandow. After all, even the most brilliant of us have to get through a certain amount of work for our degrees. There are lectures to be attended, there is private reading, not to speak of the time which has to be devoted to the ordinary social amenities of life at a University. Sport has its proper place in the life of an undergraduate; but it does not, and cannot, absorb the whole of that life. Yet if a man is to spend two hours with Mr. Sandow, and about two hours and a half (I calculate from the moment he leaves his rooms until he returns from the river) on the exercise of rowing, it is not easy to see how he will have sufficient vigour left to him to tackle the work required even for the easiest of pass examinations. I can foresee that not only the man himself, but his tutors and his parents might offer some rather serious objections.
But I am not going to content myself with pointing out these preliminary difficulties. I go further, and say that the whole proposal is based upon a fallacy. The method of training and development that may fit a man admirably for the purpose of weight-lifting, or of excelling his fellow-creatures in the measurement of his chest and his muscles, is utterly unsuited for a contest that requires great quickness of movement, highly developed lung-power, and general endurance spread over a period of some twenty minutes. It does not follow that because a man measures forty-two inches round the chest, and has all his muscles developed in proportion, he will therefore be better fitted for the propulsion of a racing-boat than a man who in all points of development is his inferior. If I produced Mr. C. W. Kent incognito before Mr. Sandow and asked whether it would be feasible to include this gentleman in an eight-oared crew, Mr. Sandow would probably laugh me to scorn. Mr. Sandow could doubtless hold out Mr. Kent at arm's length with the greatest possible ease. I am perfectly certain that Mr. Kent—if he will pardon me for thus making free with his name—could do nothing of the kind to Mr. Sandow. Yet I am perfectly certain, too, that, in a severely contested race, Mr. Kent—admittedly one of the finest strokes that ever rowed—would, to put it mildly, be more useful than Mr. Sandow. All gymnasium work, and even the modified form of it patented by Mr. Sandow, must tend to make men muscle-bound, and therefore slow. Skilled rowing consists of a series of movements which have to be gone through with a peculiar quickness, precision, and neatness. To be able to go through Mr. Sandow's eight weight exercises, to lift weights, to carry horses on your chest, may indicate great muscular strength, but it has absolutely nothing to do with being able to row. If a rowing man requires some exercise subsidiary to rowing, he would, in my opinion, be far better advised if he devoted some of his spare time to boxing and to fencing, exercises which necessitate immense quickness and perfect combination between brain, hand, and eye, than if he were to spend time in building up his body with such exercises as are included in the Sandow curriculum. But, in the main, rowing must develop for itself the muscles it requires. It is an exercise which, when all is said and done, can only be learnt effectively in a boat on the water. It is thus, and thus only, that a man can acquire the necessary movements, and perfect himself in that sense of balance and of rhythm which is as necessary to a rowing man as muscular strength. My experience leads me to the conclusion that men who, though naturally well-framed and proportioned, are not afflicted with excessive muscle, are more likely to be useful in rowing than the pet of a gymnasium or the muscle-bound prodigies made in the image of Mr. Sandow. I may cite as examples such men as Mr. R. P. P. Rowe, Mr. R. O. Kerrison, Mr. W. Burton Stewart, Mr. W. E. Crum, Mr. J. A. Ford, and Mr. C. W. Kent.[18] All these men acquired their unquestionable excellence as oarsmen by the only possible method—that is, by long practice of rowing in boats. Even an exercise so nearly resembling actual rowing as the tank work practised in the winter by American crews has very serious disadvantages. It might be supposed that it would exercise and keep in trim the muscles required for actual rowing; but its effect is to make men slow and heavy, faults which they have to correct when they once more take to the river.
With regard to Mr. Sandow's revolutionary proposals about diet, smoking, and hours, I have only this to say. We rowing men have shown time after time that by adhering to what I do not hesitate to call our common-sense system of rules tempered with indulgences we can bring our men to the post in the most perfect health and condition, absolutely fit, so far as their wind and powers of endurance are concerned, to take part in the severest contests. What has Mr. Sandow shown that should avail, with these results before our eyes, to make us exchange our disciplined liberty for his unfettered license? In the mean time we shall very properly hesitate to take the leap in the dark that he suggests.
I trust that the President of the C.U.B.C. will, in future, conduct the practice of his crew according to the methods that have proved their efficacy over and over again, and that he will not listen to the voice of Mr. Sandow, charm he never so unwisely. Non tali auxilio are boat-races to be won.
