What is rowing?
In Samoa, rowing already has a name and a season. The fautasi — forty to fifty oars, a captain, a drummer, and a village behind every seat — pulls for Apia Harbour on Independence Day, and across the water American Samoa's crews race for Flag Day. Samoan already has the word for what those crews are doing: alo. To row. Olympic rowing is that same word in a different boat.
The village boat: fautasi training, Upolu — photo: Andrew Moore, CC BY-SA 2.0
Same stroke, smaller boat
Olympic rowing takes the act every fautasi crew already knows — driving a boat with oars, backs to the bow — and puts it in a small, light racing shell: one sculler with two oars, or crews of two, four, or eight. The seats slide, so the legs do as much of the work as the back and arms. What changes is not the stroke. It is how few of you there are in the boat. As one fautasi rower put it after switching to Beach Sprint: "You're your own crew, whatever mistakes that you've done it's on you" (World Rowing, 2025).
Nothing in that stroke belongs to men alone, and Samoa said so on its own water first: Vaimasenu'u Zita Martel has skippered the fautasi Segavao since 2001 — the first woman to captain a fautasi — and in 2020 an all-women's crew raced Apia Harbour for the first time. Olympic rowing takes that as the standard — women race every event, in every boat class, in every country.
Flat water: two thousand metres in lanes
The classic race is 2,000 metres in buoyed lanes on calm water — singles, doubles, quads, pairs, fours, and the famous eights. It has been on the Olympic programme since Paris 1900; the 1896 regatta was blown out and never rowed. It is where Samoa's rowers have raced internationally before. It also asks for long, flat, sheltered water and a marked course.
Surf: Beach Sprint
The other race asks for exactly what Samoa has. Beach Sprint starts on dry sand: sprint fifty metres down the beach, push a coastal boat out, row 250 metres through the surf, slalom the buoys, turn 180 degrees around the last one, row 250 back — then jump out and run up the beach to the finish. About 600 metres, two boats head to head. A time trial seeds the draw; after that it is straight knockouts, race after race in an afternoon. It makes its Olympic debut at Los Angeles 2028 and is the focus of World Rowing's development programme in Oceania. American Samoa raced its first crews at the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals in 2025; Samoa's entry races at the Oceania Beach Sprint Championships this September.
To go deeper, World Rowing's illustrated guide to coastal rowing covers the boats, the surf skills, and the racing formats: Coastal Rowing — a World Rowing guide (PDF, 22 MB).
Dry land: the erg
The machine that started it — boathouse erg room
Neither race starts on the water. Both start on a machine. The ergometer — the erg — is the boat's motion with the water taken out, and it returns a single number: how fast you can move 2,000 metres, or 500, under your own power. No lane draw, no wind, no opinion. National teams and university programmes read those numbers long before they watch anyone row, and World Rowing runs a world championship contested on the machine alone.
That is why the erg matters here. You do not need a boat, a harbour, or a calm morning to start. An erg in a gym in Apia is already a starting line, and it is where Samoa's next rowers will be found.
Where Samoa fits
Three waters and a machine, one stroke through all of them. Samoa Rowing does not run the fautasi — the villages and districts do, and no one does it better. What the Association is building is the road from that harbour to the other two, and someone on the line when Beach Sprint's Olympic era opens at LA 2028, with the Games coming to our own region in Brisbane in 2032. Sāmoa alo va'a — Samoa rows. Whether you have pulled a fautasi oar, sat on an erg at the gym, or never touched either — Talofa lava. Get in touch.