Australian rowers won’t use Sydney oar innovation at Olympic Games despite claimed speed improvements

An Australian designer says he is devastated Rowing Australia (RA) has declined to test his invention that has been used by Italy to win a world championship, and which he says could help Australia claim Olympic gold.

Ian Randall designed the Randall Foil — a 30-centimetre piece of moulded plastic that attaches to the top of a rowing oar at a 90-degree angle to the blade.

The foils have been approved by rowing’s world governing body, FISA, and were used by Italian rower Martino Goretti when he won the men’s lightweight single sculls at last year’s World Rowing Championships in Ottensheim, Austria.

Randall said he had been in discussions with RA for four years since he first produced a successful prototype of the foils, which he said challenged conventional thinking about rowing technique.

This week he received a letter from RA performance director Bernard Savage, who said his organisation would not test the blades before next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

Randall said the decision not to properly test the foils was a lost opportunity.

“I am devastated that they haven’t,” Randall said.

Randall said it was an example of Australia not taking advantage of home-grown innovation.

Savage said RA thought it would be too risky to test the foils with the Olympic Games less than 300 days away.

“The decision was not one made on a whim,” he said.

“We felt the risk was far too great around that.

“I said to Ian that we would be in a far better position to do this at the start of the next cycle, after the Games so we have the time to do it properly.”

Randall, a teacher at a Sydney girls’ high school and a former high-level competitive rower, said he designed the hydrofoils to increase the efficiency of traditional rowing blades.

He said the foils worked by keeping the oar near the surface of the water, which reduced resistance from the oar’s shaft.

“It worked straight away,” Randall said.

That is exactly the experience of Paul McGann — a former national coach with Australia and Great Britain — who is currently the director of rowing at Melbourne High School.

“I must say the boys are big fans of them,” he said.

“The foils drop the blades in to the correct depth.”

McGann said rowing was a conservative sport and he could understand RA’s reluctance to try the foils.

But he added: “If I was a national coach I’d be tempted to use it as an experiment.”

Randall says the foils can increase speeds by 5 per cent.

That was disputed by Savage, who said some testing of the foils had been done in 2018 with two women’s crews.

“Some athletes felt that they might have been good, some didn’t like the feel of them at all, and the change in boat speed was inconclusive,” Savage said.

Randall said the testing was not valid, as the tests were done in difficult conditions in just one session and RA did not share the data.

Randall has not taken out a patent on his design.

“As a teacher, I’d love to see this design out there,” he said.

“The design isn’t protected. I thought I would do an open-source design and share it with the rowing community.”

Randall said he initially produced the foils himself in his kitchen with parts bought from a local hardware store. He has since gone into production with a partner in Austria.

He has sold sets to national programs in Ireland, Germany and Holland.

The Australian head coach of the Chinese rowing team, Paul Thompson, has bought 20 pairs for testing.

But Noel Donaldson, who coached Australia’s “Oarsome Foursome” to two Olympic gold medals in the men’s coxless fours, said he could understand RA’s decision not to test the foils this close to the Tokyo Games.

“You need longitudinal studies over a long time to do this,” Donaldson said.

Former Australian Olympic rowing coach, and US men’s head coach, Tim McLaren, said his athletes who had trialled the foils were ambivalent about their effectiveness.

“They just want to drop it in, row, and see if it makes them faster,” McLaren said.

“They don’t want to do the 10 steps that it might take to maximise its impact if, in fact, it does make a difference.”

McLaren said the foils were best suited to individual scullers like Italy’s Goretti, as opposed to multi-crew boats.

“Out of a whole group, you’ll have some people complain and say they don’t like them,” he said.

Randall has approached two of the world’s leading rowing equipment manufacturers, who declined to work with him.

But the foils are available fitted via the world’s third-largest manufacturers, and are sold through Australia’s largest rowing equipment supplier.