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60 free Rowing trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Rowing is one of the oldest Olympic sports and one of the most misunderstood: most people could not tell you the difference between sculling and sweep rowing, why the cox is the only person facing forwards, or why a race called the Head of the River is not a race at all in the usual sense. This quiz covers the sport from Thames watermen and Doggett's Coat and Badge in 1715 through the first Boat Race, the founding of Henley and Leander, and on to the modern Olympic programme. You will find questions on boat classes and positions, the phases of the stroke, lightweight limits and coxswain weights, ergometers and Concept2, and the great head races in London and Boston. There is a strong run of questions on the sport's legends: Steve Redgrave's five golds, Elisabeta Lipă's twenty-year span, Ekaterina Karsten's one-hundredth-of-a-second win, Mahé Drysdale, Katherine Grainger and the Washington eight from The Boys in the Boat. Roughly a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has watched an Olympic final, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who have actually pulled an oar. Every answer is checked against the sport's reference pages, and every question carries its source.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the United States, the sport of rowing is commonly known by what one-word name?
Crew
The name comes from the crew of a boat, and college programmes in the US still call themselves crew teams.
Q 02What is the key difference between rowing and paddling sports?
The oars are attached to the boat
Rowlocks (or gates) fix the oar to the boat and turn it into a lever; a paddle is held freely.
Q 03In which discipline of rowing does each rower hold two oars, one in each hand?
Sculling
In sweep rowing each rower holds one oar with both hands, so sweep boats always have an even number of rowers.
Q 04How long is the standard course for Olympic and World Championship rowing races?
2 kilometres
Masters rowers often race 1,000 m and sprints can be as short as 500 m, but the championship distance is 2 km in buoyed lanes.
Q 05Where did competitive rowing begin, with races among professional watermen in the early 1600s?
The River Thames in London
The watermen were the taxi drivers of their day, ferrying passengers across the river, and prizes were put up by the London Guilds and Livery Companies.
Q 06Which college formed the first American college rowing club, in 1843?
Yale
Nine years later it began racing Harvard, and that regatta became the oldest intercollegiate sporting event in the United States.
Q 07Rowing was on the programme of the first modern Olympics in 1896 but no races took place. Why?
Bad weather
Men have raced at every Games since 1900, making rowing one of the oldest Olympic sports despite the false start.
Q 08At which Summer Olympics was women's rowing first contested?
1976 Montreal
Adding women's events gave national federations an incentive to support women's crews, and the sport grew quickly afterwards.
Q 09The world's oldest surviving rowing race, first held on the Thames in 1715, is named after what prize?
Doggett's Coat and Badge
Up to six apprentice watermen still race it every year, and the winner receives a red coat with a silver badge.
Q 10Thomas Doggett, who founded the watermen's race in 1715, was known for what profession?
Actor and theatre manager
He was joint manager of the Drury Lane Theatre and relied on watermen to ferry him between the City and his home in Chelsea.
Q 11The 1715 Thames watermen's race badge displays the horse of which royal house?
Hanover
The badge also carries the word Liberty and marks the accession of George I in 1714.
Q 12Founded in 1818, which club is the world's oldest public rowing club?
Leander
Its pink colours are famous at Henley, and the second-oldest surviving club is Der Hamburger und Germania Ruder Club of 1836.
Q 13The first Boat Race between the two great English universities took place in which year?
1829
It was only the second intercollegiate sporting event ever, two years after the first Varsity cricket match.
Q 21Coubertin modelled parts of the IOC on the organisers of which rowing event?
Henley's Stewards
Henley's self-perpetuating body of Stewards pre-dates any national or international rowing federation.
Q 22The Head of the Charles Regatta is held on a river separating Boston and which city?
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Around 11,000 athletes in more than 2,500 boats race the three-mile course each October.
Q 23The oldest and most famous head race, held each March on the Thames, was founded in 1926 by whom?
Steve Fairbairn
Q 14The Boat Race is rowed on the Thames between which two points?
Putney and Mortlake
The Championship Course is 4.2 miles, more than three times the length of an Olympic race.
Q 15In the Boat Race, which university's crew wears light blue?
Cambridge
Oxford took dark blue in 1829 because five of its crew came from Christ Church, whose colours were dark blue.
Q 16The men's Boat Race has ended in a dead heat only once. In which year?
1877
The judge, John Phelps, had no way of separating the crews at the line and could only call it a tie.
Q 17What happened to the two crews during the 1912 Boat Race?
The boats sank
Cambridge also sank in 1859 and 1978, and Oxford in 1925 and 1951, when the race was re-rowed the following Monday.
Q 18The 2012 Boat Race was halted for over 30 minutes when a protester did what?
Swam between the boats
Australian Trenton Oldfield said he was protesting spending cuts and elitism; the race was restarted from a point near where it stopped.
Q 19Henley Royal Regatta was established in which year?
1839
The town started the regatta after the interest generated by the early Boat Races, and it has run every summer since except in wartime and 2020.
Q 20What is the most prestigious event at Henley Royal Regatta?
The Grand Challenge Cup
It is a race for men's eights and has been awarded since the regatta was first staged in 1839.
Head racing was exported to the United States in the 1950s, where the Head of the Charles became the largest rowing event in the world.
Q 24In a head race, how do the boats start?
One at a time, at intervals
Boats set off 10 to 20 seconds apart and are timed, so the fastest crew is awarded the title Head of the River.
Q 25In a bumps race, what is a crew trying to do?
Catch and touch the boat ahead
Oxford and Cambridge colleges race bumps twice a year, and the finishing order sets the starting order the following year.
Q 26In an eight, which rowers are responsible for setting the stroke rate and rhythm?
The stern pair
The middle four are known as the engine room, while the bow pair are the technical rowers who balance the boat.
Q 27What is the nickname for the middle four rowers of an eight?
The engine room
They are usually the biggest and most powerful members of the crew rather than the most technical.
Q 28Under World Rowing rules, what is the minimum weight for a coxswain?
55 kg
An underweight cox has to carry dead weight, such as sandbags, so no crew gains an advantage from a tiny steerer.
Q 29In a bowloader boat, where does the coxswain sit?
Lying in the bow
Bowloaders are usually coxed fours and coxed pairs, and the cox looks over the rowers' backs at the course ahead.
Q 30The moment a rower places the oar spoon in the water at the start of a stroke is called what?
The catch
The stroke runs catch, drive, extraction, recovery; the glide of the boat between strokes is called run.