The Great Watts Lie

There is a specific type of man in every rowing club car park, and you will recognise him instantly. He has just done a café ride on the bike instead of the erg, he owns at least one item of clothing with the word “aero” printed on it, and he has started saying “watts” the way other men say “reps.” I know this man well. For about three weeks a year, I become him.

This year those three weeks coincided with the Tour de France, and my club’s WhatsApp group did what it always does when the Tour is on: it turned into a shrine to Tadej Pogačar and a small crime scene for rowing’s reputation.

The provocation was a number. On stage 19, up Alpe d’Huez, Pogačar held roughly 440 watts for thirty-five minutes and change, on his way to a fifth Tour title that puts him level with Merckx, Hinault, Anquetil and Indurain — a club so exclusive it makes the Leander members’ bar look like a Wetherspoons. Tibbett posted the number to the group with the caption “and rowers think 2k is hard.” Tibbett is fifty-four, has been threatening to do a proper winter of erging since roughly 2019, and owns more cycling kit than any man who has never raced a bicycle should.

I did what any self-respecting oarsman does when his tribe is insulted. I got defensive, then I got the calculator out. Our sport’s crown jewel — the 2000m erg world record — currently sits at 5:33.4, set by Simon van Dorp back in March, edging out Oliver Zeidler’s mark from just weeks earlier. That works out to around 600 watts. Six hundred! I sent it into the group with the smugness of a man who has just won an argument he doesn’t fully understand.

Which, as it turned out, I hadn’t.

Because somebody — there is always somebody — pointed out that comparing a 35-minute effort to a five-and-a-half-minute one is not a comparison. It’s asking why Usain Bolt can’t hold his 100m pace for a marathon. Every engine produces less power the longer you ask it to run. Big number, short time. Smaller number, long time. This is the entire point of a power-duration curve, and it is taught to teenagers. I have been rowing for twenty years and had apparently decided it didn’t apply to me.

That stung rather more than losing the WhatsApp argument.

So I went looking for a fairer fight, and found one in Filippo Ganna, an Italian shaped like a filing cabinet who holds cycling’s Hour Record: 56.792 kilometres in sixty minutes, at an estimated 440 to 460 watts. Now put an oarsman next to him. Eric Murray, two Olympic golds and no discernible pain receptors, once sat on an erg and rowed for a full hour: 18,728 metres, about 394 watts, with his heart rate above 190 for fifty of those sixty minutes. Same duration. Same clock. No gravity for one to blame, no drag for the other to hide behind. And the cyclist still wins. I had gone looking for the comparison that would vindicate us, found the only clean one available, and lost that too.

The difference isn’t toughness. It’s what each sport is fighting. Cycling up a mountain is a war against your own bodyweight, which is why the best climbers look like they’ve been assembled from spare tent poles. Rowing barely punishes mass at all, which is why the best rowers look like they were grown deliberately. Pogačar is 63 kilograms. Van Dorp is closer to 95. Both numbers are correct. Neither proves the other man is soft.

Which brings me back to Tibbett. Because while I was busy being wrong about watts, he was busy being wrong about something more expensive. He has bought a Colnago Y1Rs — the one Colnago’s own white paper says needs 20 fewer watts than its predecessor to hold 50kph — and rides it almost exclusively on a Sunday café loop at a heart rate that wouldn’t trouble a nap, a good twenty kilometres an hour short of anywhere that aero saving does anything at all. He also has, by his own cheerful admission, around nine kilograms he could lose before his next birthday, and a standing talent for discovering that the erg session doesn’t quite fit this week whenever the weather is nice enough for the bike. He bought the machinery of a Grand Tour winner and declined the two things that are actually free: the training and the weight. Pogačar didn’t get to 6.99 watts per kilo by owning the right frame. He got there by doing the unglamorous sessions and weighing 63 kilograms. The Y1Rs is the paint job. The missed erg piece is the whole number.

There is one place where the cyclists genuinely have us beaten, and I’ll concede it before somebody makes me. The Tour ran 21 stages and about 3,300 kilometres in three weeks, several days over 180km, back to back, uphill, surrounded by 180 nervous men who occasionally fall off. A regatta asks for two races in a day and then lets you go and lie down. Being good on day nineteen is a different sport to being good once.

I’m not thrilled about any of this, if I’m honest. I much preferred believing that rowers were simply the hardest people in endurance sport and cyclists were gifted amateurs with better tans and worse haircuts. What I’ve actually learned is that I spent a fortnight sneering at a man for buying performance instead of doing the work, while I was doing precisely the same thing with numbers — grabbing the one figure that flattered me and waving it about instead of reading the thing properly.