28 March 2025
By Bill Miller
In a second Photo Essay – the first one was dealing with International Regatta Poster between 1900 and 2000 – rowing historian Bill Miller shows Postal Stamps from around the world.
In 1972 I participated in the Olympic Trials on Lake Waramaug, Connecticut, USA. A poster was printed for the event and designed by Thomas Kudzma. Tom was President of the New England Amateur Rowing Association and American Henley Regatta Association. He designed many posters for New England regattas in the 1960s through 1980s. The 1972 Olympic Trials poster caught my fancy. It shows images of nine postal stamps depicting rowing.
As I began collecting vintage rowing items, I thought it would be fun to collect these vintage postage stamps. How many could there be? Thirty-forty-fifty? To my surprise there are over 250 just through to 1997.
Postal stamps are issued as singular stamps used for postage and occasionally a commemorative issue is printed called a souvenir sheet.
Postal stamps should not be confused with poster stamps which are sometimes called cinderellas. Poster stamps are printed to promote an event or advertising but not for postal use.
A Spanish collector, Rafael Monteavaro Garcia, published the Catalogo Mundial De Sellos De Romo, a rowing postal stamp catalogue in 1999. He catalogued the individual postal stamps and special commemorative souvenir editions. Approximately 100 pages are filled with color images of each issue with Spanish-English descriptions. It is very thorough and a great resource for identifying these special stamps.
Also in 1999, he printed a matching album where stamps can be mounted corresponding to their listing in the catalogue.
Many countries with little connection to the sport of rowing issued rowing stamp editions. A note of interest: during this period Great Britain and Australia only issued one, Canada and USA issued three while Czechoslovakia issued seven, Yugoslavia twelve and Romania issued seventeen.
My mission here in the Photo Essay 2 is to pull together a selection of the great images of rowing postal stamps spanning the years of the catalogue, 1925-1997. I won’t try to include the nearly 250 that were issued. Too many for this post.
Take a look…
(one of set of six denominations with rowing images)
Hear The Boat Sing 
I had forgotten the Commonwealth Games stamp in 1986. More recently, a feature of the 2012 Olympics & Paralympics in London was that each British gold medallist appeared on a stamp, and was also celebrated by a gold letter box in their home town.
Unlike the above stamps which are graphic design artworks, the Team GB 2012 stamps all comprised photographs of the gold medallists – 29 individual images. I bought the complete set: 29 sheets of 6 at 60p cost £104.40 for 174 stamps. It was well worth it as I still have half of them left and the price of stamps in the UK has increased much more than inflation!
Some of the depictions of rowing technique are truly terrible! I particularly liked the image of Thomas Lange on the 1989 Sierra Leone stamp. He wouldn’t have won many gold medals sculling like that!
This is fabulous! Thank you very much. Regards, Don Costello. Oregon
Nice collection, unfortunately missing is the 1976 stamp from the Federal Republic of Germany, https://www.briefmarken-bilder.de/brd-briefmarken-1976/rudern-vierer-olympia which was actually intended to honor the 1972 Olympic champion in the M4+ class. It accidentally depicted the second in that class from the GDR. It wasn’t well received overall. GDR athletes found it amusing when they found out about it after 1989. The stroke is clearly recognizable, and the original image shows the recumbent cox, who was removed for the design of the stamp. Look here https://www.rrk-online.de/rudern/chronrudern/ddrmeist/ddr-m-vm.htm under 1971