Golden Blades Of St. Petersburg

After some days of Indian Summer, we seem to have many gloomy days ahead of us here in New England. This makes me look back at the summer and some of the wonderful rowing races and regattas. One of the great events that I neglected to write about or even mention on HTBS, was the Russian ‘Golden Blades of St. Petersburg’. These 250-metre sprint races on 12 June, 2011, in the centre of the beautiful city, had several international athletes present.

The competitors were rowing in match races, ‘Henley style’, to be able to come up with the two finalists who were rowing for a ‘cup’. The Swede, Frida Svensson, who then was the reigning World Champion in the single sculls, won the Princess Olga Cup by beating the Czech sculler Mirka Knapkova, who later became the World Champion in Bled. The final in the men’s single sculls became an all-Russian affair, where Kleshnev, who had overpowered Mahe Drysdale on his way to the final, defeated Mikhail Fedorov to claim the Peter the Great Cup.

In the men’s eights, St. Petersburg surprisingly overcame Germany in the final. The women’s final was won by the Netherlands ahead of Canada. Hamburg University won the University women’s eights, while St. Petersburg University won the University men’s eights.

The wonderful video on top shows this event conducted under blue skies. It looks lovely, and it seems to have been a successful regatta as it is coming back next summer. Personally, I think that sprint regattas are great events, and if done the ‘Henley style’, with only two boats abreast, they can be raced on rivers and canals in towns and city centres where it is easy for spectators to gather to see world stars competing against each other. The short distance of a ‘sprint’ does not allow the athletes to do any mistakes on the water. I think it is a good way to popularize rowing.

Girl With Oar Too Sexy For Stalin…

“Girl with an Oar” being installed in Gorky Park (click on the arrow on the lower left to start the video).

Right now a wave of nostalgia for Soviet cultural icons goes through the Russian people, wrote Richard Boudreaux in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. One example is the statue “Girl with an Oar”, which was sculpted by one of Josef Stalin’s favourite artists, Ivan Shadr. In 1934, Shadr’s 23-foot nude statue was erected in Gorky Park, which was created in 1928, where it became the park’s centerpiece. However, the Soviet dictator had second thoughts about its nudity, so it was shipped off to Ukraine, where it vanished.

Shadr made a second nude statue which was more in line with the contemporary ‘Socialist realism’ - softer, less muscular, more feminine - and it was followed by many copies of girls holding oars all over the Soviet Union, with, as Boudreaux puts it in his article, they were “clad in swimwear or track suits” as “vacuous imitations made by minor sculptors playing it safe with censors.”

Ivan Shadr died in 1941, the same year German bombings of Moscow destroyed the “Girl with an Oar” in Gorky Park. Nevertheless, he had had a smaller-size plaster version made which his widow cast in bronze in the 1950s, which was kept in Moscow’s Tretyakov, a large storage place of Russian art. It was there the Russian Rowing Association, in a hunt led by Yulia Anikeyeva, a two-time Soviet rowing champion and executive director of the Association, tracked it down.

The Russian Rowing Association, which now has made the “Girl with an Oar” its symbol, has had a 6-foot-7-inch copy made of the sculpture. It will be unveiled today, Saturday, at an annual rowing regatta on the Moscow River, by Gorky Park. The Russian Rowing Association has not missed the opportunity to hype the event, and has, as the article in The Wall Street Journal said, “hired a veteran Playboy photographer to produce a photo exhibit of seven leggy Russian actresses and other celebrities holding oars in various poses. All the models are clothed, some just barely.”



Read Richard Boudreaux article here (where you will also find a slide-show with old photographs of the “Girl with an Oar” and Ivan Shadr, and the ‘leggy’ Russian celebrities).