7 June 2024

By Göran R Buckhorn

Earlier this week, Tim Koch wrote about British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s visit to Leander Club in Henley. The PM is not a rower, instead it was “a party political election visit,” Tim wrote, for the upcoming election on 4 July.

There is more political news in the world which involves rowing. But let’s take it from the beginning.

In October last year, I received a kind email from Felipe Pinto in Mexico. Felipe is an oarsman and avid HTBS reader, and he also likes reading rowing books. It was when he had bought and read the rowing anthology I had edited, The Greatest Rowing Stories Ever Told (thank you, Felipe!), he saw in my short “biography” that I was a member of Malmö Roddklubb in Sweden and that I had studied at Lund University. Felipe felt he had to contact me to say that his youngest son was going to be an exchange student at Lund University this spring.

I replied that if his son also was a rower, he should join the Lund University Rowing Club (LURK) whose members row out of the rowing club in Malmö.

Then this week, Felipe contacted me again saying that his son has now wrapped up his studies in Lund and was soon to return home. Although Felipe’s son is not a rower, he went to Malmö Roddklubb when he was visiting Malmö. The first time, there was ice on the canal and the club house was closed. Just a few weeks ago, he was in Malmö again and while he could see a boat on the canal, sadly there was no one at the club. But being a good son, he took a photograph and did a 13-second video from the bridge by the club house to send to his father.

Felipe continued to write that there had been a presidential election in Mexico last Sunday, which I had seen on the news. The landslide victory of the election went to the former Mayor of Mexico City, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, 61, who is a politician, scientist, academic and environmentalist. Dr Sheinbaum will become the first female president in the country’s 200-year history.

She studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and earned an undergraduate degree in 1989, a master’s degree in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1995 in energy engineering. Between the years 1991 and 1994, Sheinbaum worked on her PH.D. thesis at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Besides writing that Mexico has had a presidential election, Felipe reveals something that HTBS Types will appreciate. He wrote: “[T]he lady who will be our next president will also be the first woman and the first rower (ex-rower) to be president here. She rowed with us at the team of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in the early ’80s, as a lightweight.” Felipe continues: “Claudia raced in local regattas and in the Canadian Henley in 82.”

So there we have it; an ex-rower steps into the political limelight.

Dr Sheinbaum will now join a small and exclusive group of presidents and monarchs who have rowed: U.S. presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and some sources say, John F. Kennedy?), King Frederik IX of Denmark, King Olav V of Norway and Prince Albert of Monaco. Though not being head of state, the following leaders of Australia (prime ministers) rowed: Edmund Barton, Chris Watson, Stanley Bruce, John Grey Gorton, William McMahon, Gough Whitlam and Tony Abbott.