Olympic centenary for powerboating

You may not realise it, but powerboating is an Olympic sport. Or, we perhaps should more rightly say, it was. In the 1908 Olympic Games in London, two motorboat events were included in the schedule, and this year we look back to those races as powerboating celebrates its Olympic 100th anniversary.

The 1908 Olympic Games was a year of firsts. The length of the marathon was set at the now-traditional 26-miles and 385 yards after it was decided to start the race at Windsor Castle and end it in front of the royal box of Queen Alexandra, while winter sports made their debut with the inclusion of an ice skating event. But it is powerboating that remains the true unique event of that year’s games, with motorised sport being included for the first – and only – time on the Olympic schedule.

That year, there were three 40Nm motorboat events, run on five laps around an 8Nm course near Southampton, with five entrants from Great Britain, and one from France. The British crew of Thomas Thornycroft, Bernard Redwood and John Field-Richards won the race for under-60ft boats and the race for eight-metre boats, despite incredibly rough conditions on the race course, but it was the French sole entry of Emile Thubron that emerged the only survivor of the open-class race, held twice after conditions became too severe to complete the race first time around.

There has been much debate over the course of the last century about whether any form of motorsport – land or sea-based – should be included as an Olympic sport. The detractors say that these aren’t true ‘Olympic’ endeavours in the sense that outside, technical influences have as much bearing on results as the Herculean ideal of pure, human strength and stamina. 

The concept’s backers, on the other hand, say that the demands on racing drivers are as equally as intense – if not more so – than for any other sport. Anyone looking at a racing driver fresh from a Formula 1 grand prix, or the Powerboat P1 racers frantically cooling themselves down after the heat and endeavour of the Tunisian Grand Prix of the Sea would certainly agree with that argument.