Why Haven’t More People Found Rowing Yet?
Why Haven’t More People Found Rowing Yet?
The 2026 Swedish Rowing Championships on Lake Munksjön brought two days of rain, sunshine, medals and 107 races. But somewhere between the docks, the umpire launch, the hamburgers, the old racing oars and the people who never really seem to leave the sport, another question kept growing: why don’t more people want to be part of this?
The rain has already found its way into everything.
It hangs over Lake Munksjön, hits the camera, bounces off the docks. A few minutes later the clouds break and the sun makes an attempt to take over.
Then it starts again.
On shore, jackets are pulled tighter.
The rowers do not seem particularly bothered.
They sit there in thin racing suits, waiting for their start and trying to stay focused. It is around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, or 13 Celsius. The water is in front of them. Behind them are months and years of training, about to be reduced to a few minutes in which there is nowhere left to hide and nothing left to save.
Soon their heart rates will be through the roof.
Legs, backs and arms will burn.
Their lungs will ask for more oxygen than their bodies can possibly provide.
And when it is over, some of them will barely want to stand.
Yet it is hard to find anyone who looks as if they would rather be somewhere else.
That may be the first thing you need to understand about rowing.
This is not a sport people simply happen to do.
It seems to get hold of them.
This is not a traditional race report. It is a sports photographer’s view from the water’s edge — focused on the feeling, the moments and the people that make the sport what it is.
The 2026 Swedish Rowing Championships were held on September 19–20 on Lake Munksjön, right in the center of Jönköping. A total of 305 athletes were entered in a program of 107 races covering senior and junior national championships, the Swedish university championships and federation events.
The course is straight, calm and six lanes wide, covering 1,810 meters.
It is also a place with history.
Jönköpings Roddsällskap was founded on January 19, 1884, and has had its home and boathouse by Munksjön ever since. The club hosted the Junior World Championships in 1984, with 1,200 athletes from more than 30 countries, and later hosted events including the Baltic Cup in 2015 and the European Universities Rowing Championship in 2019.
You can tell that people here have spent a long time thinking about how rowing actually works.
At the start, one small detail catches my attention.
The people holding the shells in place lie on an angled board positioned at exactly the right height above the water. It sounds insignificant until you see it. The setup allows them to reach the boats comfortably and securely without having to hang awkwardly over the edge.
I have seen plenty of rowing starts.
This was the best solution I have ever seen.
And it says something about an old rowing environment. Someone saw a problem, solved it well, and over time the solution simply became part of the place.
But fairly quickly, I stop noticing the facility and start noticing the people.
Someone is working the concession stand, selling hamburgers, chips and drinks.
A little later, that same person is sitting in a boat.
Someone is responsible for communications around the regatta and then disappears because it is time to race.
Someone is driving an umpire launch.
Someone else fills in wherever they are needed.
A boat breaks down, and people from another club help find spare parts.
Hardly anyone seems to have only one role.
Rower.
Coach.
Volunteer.
Parent.
Official.
Hamburger seller.
It all blends together.
And yes, the rivalry is there.
Of course it is.
Per-Anders Enenge almost laughs when I ask him about the family atmosphere between clubs.
On the water, they are competitors.
When the boats are locked in at the start, everyone wants to beat the crew next to them.
But when something breaks, you lend equipment.
You help each other.
“It is a pretty small family,” he says.
It is a simple sentence.
After two days on Munksjön, it is difficult to forget.
Because that small family also has a problem.
Per-Anders has been involved in Swedish rowing for a long time, and his picture of the sport is not entirely positive. Masters and recreational rowing have grown, he says, but the youth side is struggling.
His way of describing the size of the sport is almost brutally simple.
All the youth rowers at the competition could fit into one classroom.
All the juniors could fit into another.
And he does not believe the main problem is necessarily finding young people who want to try rowing.
The problem is finding someone to take care of them.
Qualified, committed coaches.
Adults who are willing to be there.
I have heard that story before.
In a survey I previously conducted on volunteer resources in sports clubs, 16 people representing 13 clubs across ten different sports responded. Eleven of the sixteen said it had become harder to recruit volunteers compared with five or ten years ago. Twelve identified coaches, leaders, parent involvement, officials or other human resources as a limiting factor.
On Munksjön, you can almost see what those numbers mean.
A sports club is not only the people on the starting line.
It is the person who teaches someone their first stroke.
The one who opens the boathouse on a dark morning.
The one who drives the trailer to a regatta.
The one working the concession stand.
The official.
The person repairing whatever broke.
The person who says: come on, we try again.
Maybe that is why another thing Per-Anders tells me lands so well.
When he was young, the rowing club was not their second family.
It was their first.
That could sound like nostalgia if the traces of the same culture were not visible all around Munksjön.
And perhaps it becomes clearest when you are not even a rower yourself.
I am there to take photographs, talk to people and try to tell the story of the sport.
Yet I never feel as if I am standing outside looking in.
Quite the opposite.
People seem genuinely happy that someone wants to cover rowing. They help, explain, point things out and make space.
I get the chance to ride in an umpire launch.
From there, the sport changes completely.
From shore, rowing can almost look quiet.
Up close, it is anything but.
You hear every breath.
The calls.
The commands.
The oars entering the water.
The seats moving back and forth on the slides.
The sound of the hull pushing through the lake.
And the faces.
From a few meters away, there is no missing what a rowing race actually costs.
Then something small happens that I suspect I will remember longer than many of the races.
Halmstads Roddklubb has its viewing point on the eleventh floor of a building near the finish.
Apparently, I am fairly easy to recognize.
They spot me down below.
And come down.
Not because they want something.
They come down to invite me upstairs so I can photograph the racing from their vantage point.
They absolutely did not have to do that.
But a short while later I am standing eleven floors above the lake, looking down on Munksjön from an angle I would never have found otherwise.
It gave me some great photographs.
More than that, it gave me another small piece of evidence for something I had already begun to understand.
You do not have to be holding an oar to be welcomed into rowing.
I have covered many sports.
This feeling stands out.
And when I listen to Anouk Gierveld, I understand that it is not unique to Jönköping.
She has been a member of W.S.R. Argo in the Netherlands, Dresdner Ruder Club 1902 in Germany and Malmö Roddklubb in Sweden.
Three clubs.
Three countries.
The same feeling.
She describes the rowing community as one big family and the club as a second home. The friendships become different because people train and compete together in a sport that demands both time and pain.
You connect through it.
Through the training.
Through the racing.
Through the suffering.
Then she describes something that is harder to understand if you have never sat in the boat.
The feeling of an eight that really runs.
Eight people moving as one.
The coxswain carrying the crew through the piece.
The oars entering together.
The shell suddenly feeling as if it is flying.
That may be one of rowing’s great contradictions.
Because the sport can look almost meditative.
Anouk talks about the notoriously early morning sessions. Flat water like a mirror. Fog muting the sounds. Birds and cows slowly beginning to wake.
You can almost hear the stillness.
Then they start rowing.
And suddenly everything is about force.
This is a sport that can empty a human being completely.
You can throw up.
You can finish so exhausted that your legs barely hold you.
Your body tells you to stop.
And the next day, you sit in the boat again.
Maybe that is part of what makes the sport so compelling even to those of us standing beside it.
There is no shortcut to that feeling.
You have to earn it.
Per-Anders calls rowing training good for both “the body and the mind.”
It is difficult to find a better description.
Maybe you also need someone like Jörgen Nilsson to understand what happens if you keep going long enough.
He has rowed for more than 50 years.
In 1985, he won a Swedish national championship in the eight on Lake Hjälmsjön.
In 2026, he won another Swedish title, this time in sprint rowing.
More than four decades between championship medals.
When we talk about the amount of training that goes into a rowing career, he repeats something once said by Swedish world champion Frida Svensson: roughly 1,100 training hours in a year for just a few minutes of all-out racing.
It sounds completely unreasonable.
Until Jörgen says the thing that explains almost everything.
“Eventually, it becomes part of your identity.”
Then age matters less.
Jörgen talks about rowing with Bengt Tillgren and Pär Hurtig, men with Olympic experience, long after the age when athletes in many other sports would have stopped competing.
There are rowers in their seventies who are still racing.
Not because anyone makes them.
Because they are still rowers.
And sometimes even a lifetime is not long enough for rowing to disappear from a family.
Åsa Lidén tells me about her grandfather, born in 1889.
His great passion was rowing.
He competed for Långedrags Roddklubb and was deeply involved in leading and developing the club. Old photographs show tanned men in singlets and tiny shorts gliding across mirror-flat water outside Gothenburg.
But Åsa does not talk about his results.
She talks about the friendships.
Friendships that lasted for the rest of their lives.
Later, rowing became something even more ordinary.
After her grandfather started a family, they spent their summers on a small island north of Marstrand.
How did they get there?
They rowed.
From Långedrag to Lövön.
A two-day journey.
And once they arrived, the boat remained part of everyday life.
Row to the farmer for milk.
Row out to fish.
Row to the local store.
Rowing was not a workout.
It was simply how life worked.
His old racing oars are still stored in an attic.
The family hopes to hang them on the wall one day.
I like that image.
Race results become numbers in an archive.
An old oar can still mean something more than a century later.
Maybe that is why my own strongest rowing memory is not about who won either.
It comes from the Stotesbury Cup on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.
At my last Stotesbury, there were more than 4,000 young rowers and over 800 boats.
Two days of race after race after race.
But when I think back, I do not see a finish line first.
I see the people along the riverbank.
Parents.
Kids.
Coaches.
We cooked food, waited, talked, laughed and cheered.
Entire days together by the water.
Philadelphia and Jönköping are a long way apart.
Yet that part feels strangely familiar.
Maybe that is what happens when people gather around rowing.
You come for the boats.
You remember the people.
Not every rowing memory has to be profound.
Stefan Wedefelt’s certainly is not.
He was rowing some colleagues back from an island after a work kickoff.
There were two boats.
So naturally, it became a race.
Stefan pulled as hard as he possibly could, built a big lead — and snapped the oar.
Like a toothpick.
He had not even known it was possible to break an oar by rowing.
His colleagues made sure he heard about it for a long time afterwards.
There is something good in that story too.
The strongest sports memories are not always medals.
Sometimes they are friends who are still laughing about the day everything went completely wrong.
In the middle of all this, there was still a Swedish national championship being decided.
And the racing level was high.
In the women’s single sculls, Isabella N. of Brudpiga Roddklubb won in 7:13.7, ahead of Nina J. of Sollerö IF and Emma T. of Akademiska Roddföreningen.
In the men’s single, Erik K. of Mölndals Roddklubb took the title in 6:22.6.
On Sunday, Akademiska Roddföreningen won the women’s quadruple sculls in 6:31.5, ahead of Öresjö Segelsällskap and Mölndals Roddklubb.
But the championships would end with the boat class that may best explain why rowing is so difficult to look away from.
The eight.
Eight rowers.
One coxswain.
A long, narrow shell that does not care how strong the strongest person in the crew is if the other seven are not doing the same thing at almost exactly the same moment.
Strength is not enough.
It has to happen together.
When the men’s championship final gets underway, the weather finally makes up its mind.
After two days of rain, the sun suddenly breaks through.
People gather near the finish at the northern end of Munksjön.
Akademiska Roddföreningen wins in 5:20.5, just over three seconds ahead of Mölndals Roddklubb.
Falkenberg takes bronze.
And then it happens.
The boats have crossed the line.
One crew has won.
Another has lost.
As they make their way back toward the dock, a cheer suddenly rises across the water.
A fourfold Swedish hurrah.
And it comes from one of the crews that has just been beaten.
For the winners.
I stand there with the camera and try to remember the last time I saw anything quite like it in another sport.
I cannot.
There is no result for that.
No medal.
No official statistic.
But perhaps those four cheers say more about rowing than many result sheets ever could.
It does not mean they do not want to win.
Of course they do.
Per-Anders was right.
When the boats are sitting on the starting line, the rivalry is real.
But when the race is over, they still belong to the same small family.
And that makes his concern about youth rowing almost frustrating.
Because so much of what other sports spend years trying to build is already here.
Community.
Identity.
Physical challenge.
Tradition.
Friendship.
Nature.
Competition.
Teenagers and seventy-year-olds sharing the same water.
There are mornings when the lake is glass.
There are races that push the body until there is nothing left.
There is that almost impossible sensation when an entire crew connects at exactly the right moment and the boat suddenly accelerates.
There are people who can be rivals one minute and searching for spare parts for each other the next.
There are friendships that last fifty years.
There are old racing oars sitting in attics.
There are stories that pass from one generation to another.
And there is room for more people.
That may be the hardest thing to understand while standing beside Munksjön.
Why don’t more people know about this?
I do not row.
I do not know exactly what it feels like when eight people put their blades in together and the shell suddenly starts to fly.
I do not know what it feels like to sit there on an early morning when fog is still hanging over the water and know that you are about to push yourself until your body objects.
But I have seen the faces of people who do know.
I have heard people talk about rowing after forty and fifty years as if they have barely started.
I have heard a woman describe three rowing clubs in three different countries as her second home.
I have watched people stop what they are doing to help a competitor.
I have been collected from ground level because someone decided the photographer ought to have a better view.
And I have heard a losing crew cheer for the winners.
That is enough.
After two days on Munksjön, I do not simply want to tell people that rowing is a great sport.
I want to tell them to go and see it for themselves.
Find the nearest rowing club.
Walk down to the water one evening.
Watch an eight come past at speed.
Listen to the sound when the blades enter together.
Talk to the people on the dock.
And if someone holds out an oar —
take it.
Because after the 2026 Swedish Rowing Championships, the question is no longer why people keep rowing.
It is why more people have not discovered what they are missing.
📸 See more photos
Photo gallery: Images from Swedish championship
Would you like me to cover your sport or club?
Contact: Lenniemalmgren@gmail.com
Services and pricing: Click here
Photography, concept, observations and original text by Lennie Malmgren
The text was edited and finalized with the support of AI.
Kommentarer
Skicka en kommentar