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    Rowing Documentaries That Will Leave You Oar Inspired

    Full On Fella Posted on

    Rowing is one of those sports that most people have a vague idea about without really knowing what it actually involves.

    We will all have seen the Oxford and Cambridge crews battling it out on a freezing stretch of the Thames each spring, as well as the eights gliding past at Henley in their crisp white kit, but the gap between watching it on a Sunday afternoon and actually doing it is enormous.

    Anyone who has tried to keep eight people in time on a moving slide of carbon fibre will tell you that the sport is brutal, technical and oddly poetic in roughly equal measure.

    The films on this list approach the sport from quite different angles, which is ideal to help you learn about it.

    The Boys of ’36

    This 2016 PBS American Experience documentary tells a story that George Clooney later turned into a feature film with the title The Boys in the Boat. If you want to learn about it, however, then this is the one to watch.

    The Boys of ’36 follows nine working-class lads from the University of Washington, the sons of loggers, shipyard workers and farmers, who somehow rowed their way to gold at Adolf Hitler’s Berlin Olympics. Director John Maggio uses archive footage, speaks to the surviving children of the original crew and turns to the writer whose 2013 book did much of the work that made the film possible in the first place. Daniel James Brown.

    The strength of the documentary is that it doesn’t hold any fat, coming in at fifty-three minutes in order to be tight, focused and built around the actual rowers rather than a Hollywood retelling. The footage of the original race is genuinely thrilling once you understand what these boys were up against.

    The PBS site also offers interviews and educational notes, which can be turned to in order to add some further background if that’s something that you would like to know about. Of course, stories about sports stars taking on Hitler’s Nazi Germans are always fun to listen to, so this film fits neatly into that bracket for you to enjoy.

    A Most Beautiful Thing

    In the 1990s, a teacher at Manley High School on Chicago’s West Side decided that the answer to gang violence in his school might be a rowing club. It sounds like the setup to a fairly cynical inspirational film, but Mary Mazzio’s 2020 documentary refuses to play it that way.

    A Most Beautiful Thing follows the first African-American public high school rowing team in the United States of America, reuniting them two decades on and seeing them get back into a boat as men in their late thirties and forties in order to enter the 2019 Chicago Sprints regatta. The team’s captain even reaches out to the Chicago Police Department.

    A Most Beautiful thing

    Narrated by Common and based on the memoir by Arshay Cooper, who is also one of the rowers, the film is unsentimental about what these young men were running from and about how their lives turned out. The reunion row, which culminates in the men competing alongside Chicago police officers, is a clever piece of structure that earns the emotion it draws out of the audience.

    It was ultimately released during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the Hollywood Reporter referring to it as ‘almost like a tonic for these troubled times’. That gives you some sense of what sort of film it is that you’re going to be sitting down to watch.

    Pull Like a Dog

    If you watched the 2016 Rio Olympics on the BBC, the chances are you will remember Paul and Gary O’Donovan, the lightweight double sculls duo from Skibbereen who took silver and then sat down for a post-race interview that briefly went around the entire English-speaking internet.

    Pull Like a Dog is the RTÉ documentary that followed them home, watching the brothers return to a Cork airport overrun with friends, family and several thousand people who had not previously known how to pronounce ‘Skibbereen’. The film is funnier than most sports documentaries, mostly because the O’Donovans themselves are.

    The director spends a fair amount of time with the brothers’ coaches, parents and club mates, all of whom seem to find the boys’ new fame mildly amusing rather than life-changing.

    Worth watching even if your only interest in rowing extends as far as the Oxford and Cambridge race, the story is heartening because of the success of the pair, who became the first people in the history of the Summer Olympics to take a rowing medal back to Ireland. It wasn’t just a flash in the pan either, with Paul O’Donovan going on to win gold at the World Championships as the fastest singles lightweight rower in the world not long after.

    Losing Sight of Shore

    In the April of 2015, four British women set off from San Francisco in a 29-foot boat called Doris, with the intention of rowing, unsupported, all the way to Cairns. Nine months later they arrived, having covered just over 8,000 miles and become the first all-female crew to row the Pacific.

    Sarah Moshman’s 2017 documentary, Losing Sight of Shore, is the film that came out of all the GoPro footage Laura Penhaul, Emma Mitchell, Natalia Cohen and Isabel Burnham shot along the way. Rowing for two hours on and then two hours off, the crew ran out of food with several days still to go, the anguish of which was caught on camera.

    The Coxless Crew, as they called themselves, are not professional adventurers, which is part of the reason the film works. There is no land for months at a time, only the four women, their boat and a great deal of weather and the pacing reflects that without ever feeling like a slog.

    Moshman directed much of the film from 5,000 miles away, which meant that the practical madness of the production merely serves to add to the drama of it all. Alongside the GoPro footage is work from professional film crews, who were able to catch the boat as it went close to the various shores that lie between the United States of America and Australia.

    Turning the Tide

    For anyone who has watched the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race on a wet March Saturday and wondered what on earth motivates the rowers to put themselves through it, Turning the Tide is the documentary series that finally tries to answer the question.

    Produced under the official Boat Race banner and released as an all-access docu-series, it follows the men’s and women’s squads through their training, trials and Tideway race day across recent editions of the event. The series is unusually candid about the toll the training takes, the politics of crew selection and the small slights between the universities that keep the rivalry interesting.

    Turning the Tide Documentary

    It is also a useful watch for the casual viewer, given how little of the underlying preparation actually makes it onto the BBC’s race-day coverage. The series is made up of a number of bite-sized episodes that you can get through whilst you enjoy a cup of tea, thankful for the fact that you aren’t having to get up in the early hours in order to head out onto the water and practice your rowing ahead of one of the biggest races in the calendar.

    If you weren’t already predisposed to want to take on the challenge of the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, it is unlikely that Turning the Tide is going to persuade you to pick up an oar and get involved.

    Row of Life

    This 2025 documentary is the most difficult on the list to watch, for reasons that are clear within the first few minutes. Angela Madsen, a three-time Paralympian, fourteen-time Guinness world record holder and Marine veteran, set off in 2020 to become the first paraplegic, openly gay rower to cross the Pacific alone.

    On day sixty, somewhere between California and Hawaii, she disappeared. More than a year later, her boat washed up on an atoll in the Marshall Islands, with every camera she had been filming on still inside. What director Soraya Simi then did with that footage is the heart of the film, which is as much about the person as the rowing.

    Row of Life is built largely from material Madsen shot herself, which makes it her own account in a way that very few posthumous documentaries can claim to be. It is grief-stricken, of course, but it is also funny in places and the row itself is recreated in a way that lets you feel the size of what she was attempting to do.

    Having become the first woman to row across the Indian Ocean with her teammate Helen Taylor, Madsen chose to take on the challenge of heading from Los Angeles to Hawaii on her own, knowing that if she were to get blown off course then the route would be close to 2,700 miles. A tragedy that is somehow an uplifting one.

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