As a coxswain, the greatest tool is your words. Learning to row and cox in the UK taught me how to use my language to motivate people – I learned how to improvise, to manipulate the rhythm and sounds and composition of phrases to unite a group of people in pursuit of a common goal. I hadn’t really considered how moving abroad would abruptly change that.
Since coming to Austria for university, I knew I wanted to keep rowing. However, I am not fluent in German, which has proven difficult in navigating the logistics and social dynamics of club life. Nevertheless, I wanted to get involved and find community in the sport that had brought me so much joy throughout my undergraduate studies.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about language, community, sport, and the ways that people understand each other through more than shared vocabularies. In writing this article, I spoke to three people who have previously navigated or are currently navigating rowing abroad, with different levels of language preparation and varying levels of ‘success’. Through their experiences, I hope to better understand my own, and perhaps shine a light on an aspect of recreational/student rowing that is not often spoken about.
To do this, let me tell you a story.
At the start of May, the rowing club I joined hosts Wienerachter (Vienna Eights) on a small, curved section of the Danube. The course is 4.7km, with a regatta-style side-by-side start and an almost 180-degree turn halfway through. University students, club juniors, and international rowers from Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia converge on the Austrian river banks for a lovely day of racing. This year, the sky was a brilliant blue, the sun was warm, and I was substituting into a crew visiting from Padua, Italy.
Rowing and its special vocabulary
For anyone who has rowed in more than one club, it’s a given that everyone does things a little bit differently. Even within clubs, crews develop their own unique language that can give them an extra push when it comes to racing towards the finish line.
In my experience, speaking a different language makes these discrepancies even more pronounced. Of course, there are instances where coxing calls are directly translatable, like schön gemeinsam (nice and together) or laissez glisser l’eau (let the water glide). But often, even if you know the basic meaning of the words in a target language, that doesn’t necessarily translate to understanding or using them in the boat.
One of my interview partners, Amelia, articulated this in the context of going from her university club in the UK to an Italian club on her year abroad.
“Once you get in the boat, the language that you know is completely useless,” she said.
There are dozens of ways to tell a crew what they need to do, and knowing how to say it requires learning a completely new technical language in itself.
The most obvious examples are seat numbers and sides. In the UK, strokeside, bowside, and numbering off from bow is the norm. U.S. crews use port and starboard, while Germany and Austria have the equivalent backbord and steuerbord – it’s a continuing puzzle for my brain to remember that backbord is strokeside. The French and Italian boats that Amelia and I rowed in counted up from the stroke seat, with sides labelled using even and odd – in my case, pari and dispari.
As a result, the specificity of rowing language can cause issues. Another interview partner, who began her rowing career in Germany but studied at a university in the United States, told me about a difficult first outing across the pond, even with knowing English already.
She said: “They put me in the stroke of an eight and the cox was giving commands the whole time that I couldn’t understand. And it really stressed me out because this was the first day and I wanted to show that I was capable and, you know, a good athlete and do my best in that boat.”
“But obviously, as stroke person, you have to show what everyone else should do, and I could not immediately respond to what the cox was saying because I needed clarification the whole time.”
Despite finding that first outing in the US difficult, she also mentioned how the coach reassured her it wasn’t an issue.
“He said, you know, don’t worry about it. You’re gonna get it within a couple of practices. And it ended up being fine.”
For me, even though I knew the German vocabulary for stop, slow, and turn, that didn’t necessarily mean that I’d be able to cox with the exact language that native-speakers would use.
Thankfully, though, this has never been an insurmountable barrier to participating. Rowing language can be very technical, but that doesn’t mean it has to be unintelligible.
In my first outing with the racing crew before Wienerachter, my cox made sure that I knew the important words – finale (backstops), forte (stronger), and molle/piano (less pressure), to name a few. Even in the heat of the race, where intricacies can get lost in translation, that doesn’t mean we weren’t able to understand each other. Here, language is fundamentally about getting the point across, and it’s okay if that isn’t always done perfectly.
Communication beyond language
As my crew crossed the finish line, I remember the endorphin rush. Despite understanding very little of the fast and excited Italian being spoken around me, I still felt the adrenaline and satisfaction of a race well done.
As I’ve tried to navigate a club where I don’t speak the primary language very well, something that has repeatedly struck me is how much I still love the sport, and how I keep coming back, even after particularly frustrating or disheartening experiences.
To me and everyone I interviewed, rowing feels special in that you don’t necessarily have to speak the same language to feel integrated into a crew.
One interviewee told me: “You can form a bond without speaking a lot at first. If you are a teammate and you contribute to a race or a practice, you’re just part of that team no matter the language.” Especially in the bigger boats, “you’re really just looking for the rhythm and understanding their way of rowing. It’s all just about the synchronicity.”
Of course, making fine-grained technical fixes or a detailed race plan requires some level of spoken/written communication. But the physical act of rowing feels more introspective, often requiring less talking and more doing – more time in the boat, more time paddling together and getting a feel for how to move as one unit.
In the second half of her year abroad, Amelia won an eights race with her French club; she described how “it really feels like a personal win rather than a team win sometimes”, especially when you’re rowing with a club that’s not your own and in a different language. This isn’t to say that winning in a club abroad is better than winning in your own club; in a sport where team cohesion is so important, there is something especially empowering in contributing to something that you might not feel fully able to understand or be integrated with.
For me, the race drew my attention inward, to the way that rowing and winning brings people together. It’s different from the satisfaction of culminating a season with a victory in a boat you know like the back of your hand; I think it’s closer to the heart of why I do rowing, and why I choose to continue abroad. Rather than just being drawn closer to the people, I am more aware of my sport, of what it has done for me, and the reason I show up every day, even when a team isn’t there.
Continuing abroad
At the end of the day, rowing and doing sports in a foreign language is both a challenge and an opportunity. As emphasised in my interviews and by members in my current club, rowing can be a good way to learn a language and integrate into a culture you might be unfamiliar with, but I also believe it can be far more than that.
My final interviewee, who learned to row in the UK but is currently studying in Sweden, describes how her new club is explicitly focused on building an international community through university student rowing. She emphasised how nice the community is.
She said: “A lot of people have rowed in their respective countries before and have learned a lot of different coaching styles in different countries. It’s interesting having all of those different backgrounds come together and experience rowing.”
As my German-speaking interview partner said, “Even if you feel like you can’t connect through language or you don’t have the most profound language skills yet, you can still become part of a team and find people that you have something in common with.”
In my own club, I am constantly weighing my ability to learn a new language, the frustration of not being able to express myself, and perhaps some guilt about not knowing the language of the place I’ve moved to. But as the river becomes more familiar and the circle of friends that I have met through rowing grows larger (despite the language barrier), I find myself incredibly lucky to be rowing abroad in the first place.
