JENNY BINGHAM & JENNY COOTE
WORLD CLASS ROWING

By Dave Roberts

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The meeting was easy to get started at. Walk into a local café and look for two very fit women. Easy, there they are.

The ladies in question are Jenny Bingham and Jenny Coote, and I’d come to talk about their assault on the world masters games in the rowing. By the time you read this they’re already in Hamburg, and they’re competing in several races in a number of formats and age ranges.

Mostly the Jennys race in the double skulls. That’s two women in a skinny little boat, two oars each.

The masters games is of course for those who are serious about their racing but it’s divided into age classes. There’s no discussion about this being the soft option though, and there are Olympians in the masters games who will tell you they treasure their masters medals as much as their Olympic medals.

Jenny and Jenny would go to every World Masters games if they could. There are pesky things like the cost that would be overcome if they could, and the more serious issues of looking after families. Even with the significant reasons to stay in the South West, this duo has competed in Adelaide in 1997, Seville in 1999, Montreal in 2001, Ballarat in 2002, and now Hamburg in 2004. All of these were either “the masters” or the championships run by the international federation.

Both have families and both have been business people over recent years, though Jenny Bingham has recently sold that and taken on a role as a trainer with a business college for two days per week, allowing a little more time for the vital rowing training.

So to be as old as the guy who writes South West Life and involved in a sport at world elite level, do you have to be born to it? Well not really, though there’s a family link. Jenny Bingham (JB)‘s dad rowed for the Bunbury Rowing club for 50 years. From time to time she’d seen it but hadn’t really joined in. Then 13 years ago someone talked her into watching a regatta and she recalls it as a spectacular thing to watch. Impressive enough that the next year she was in it, and a year later she’d talked a mate into becoming half of an internationally successful partnership.

To be world class is no easy feat. Jenny and Jenny train six days per week, over 9 sessions. There’s plenty of grunt work, just being fit and strong enough to propel the boat, but there is other work including yoga and stretching. It’s no good if you’re halfway down a course and something goes SNAP. It pays off though, as we noted earlier, JB and JC haven’t gone to an international regatta and come home without a medal. In fact, at the Ballarat meet they were in 10 events requiring 24 races over the 3 and a half days, and came home with 10 medals.

As you’d guess at this level, any competitor at a masters event can be required to take a drug test, and there’s every chance that given the dramas of the olympics, there’ll be a testing regime in place, which JB and JC are more than ready to meet. The three and a half day regatta will run on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th of September. Our women (the important ones from the South West) will be involved in their own double skulls race, and will combine with two Perth Rowers in the quads, and six Perth Rowers in the eights. JB will also race in the singles.

On the last day, there are some mixed races, and so they’ll wind up rowing with some of the guys, which is always fun. After that, 4 000 rowers all get to party.

The South West has produced some pretty notable rowers. There are people walking around who you mightn’t recognise as world class athletes but who could tell you a story if you asked. These two are part of something big and it could be worth keeping a check on.