History
The event started as a one off competition in 1946, as a pub bet, and was big news for the town. This original row was from Boston to Lincoln and was repeated for the next 3 years as a private event.
In 1949, Crowland Rowing Club also competed, and the course was reversed to finish at Boston. It was easier to finish at the boathouse, and the pub was next door.
In 1950 the event was opened to all competitors and has remained so to this day. It was cancelled in 2000, due to the fuel crisis. It was also cancelled in 2011 due to an unusually prolific growth of water weed.
Read more about this topic: Boston Rowing Marathon
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)