Word: stroking
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Captain Winthrop will in all probability stroke the University crew in the first race of the season, at Princeton on May 8. The veteran pace-setter of two years' stroking experience returned to his old position yesterday, after pulling at six for two months...
...chairs, churns on and on; the music must be coming to a climax, for now his arms wildly flagellate; he whips his fiddlers up to a crisis, holds his phantom cymbals and horns and woodwinds suspended in a terrific fortissimo of silence, and then, at a final mute drum-stroke, drops his arms to his sides. . . . Standing alone, his back to the audience, he orders his invisible orchestra to rise to the applause that does not come ? turns, smiles, walks quickly...
Mitchell had done well until that second hole. But after his four, a brilliant performance considering the wind and the state of the earth, he played as if he had suddenly become a machine adjusted to make holes in even fours. On the 16th he was a stroke under fours and Duncan, with three ragged fives, was three holes down. There, without dramatics, the match ended. Mitchell had won the Roehampton Club's prize of 200 pounds with an ease that made Britishers beam happily above their pipe-bowls in the bar that evening and lend their tongues...
...Although the children's crusade, as it might be called, was obviously a theatrical stroke to arouse the sympathies of the general public, it brought out the fact that the strike was partly for the children's benefit. The placards which were carried in the parade were of course sentimental in the extreme, but they contained an element of truth, and also demonstrated that the children were parading for their own sake as well as their parents...
...Oxford men were a shade the heavier. As they swung off from the start, aided by the Surrey-side current that Stroke Pitman had won in the toss, they drew three-quarters of a length ahead with a short, strong stroke, beating 36 to the minute against the 34 of the Cantab boat. Here was work for J. A. Brown. His beautiful steering helped bring Cambridge, rowing smoothly, almost abreast. The Oxford-heavies tried a spurt. At the mile the bows were dead even. Without hitting it up, the smooth-stroking Cantabs drew ahead, pricking Oxford to a fresh spurt...