Funferal

Gifu administrivia and update

I should mention that all of Heather’s posts, and my posts relating to rowing, are now available on their own page. It’s still fairly basic, mainly built on the back of the funferal style sheet and template, but I’ll try to prettify it over the next day or so, and link to the various relevant rowing sites. Also, there’s an RSS feed if that’s of use to you.Those who care probably already know that the typhoon Heather talked about in her last mail has caused the start of racing to be delayed. At first it looked like things would start on Tuesday, with four days of racing crammed into two days, but now it seems possible that only Sunday will be cancelled, with the heats being dealt with on Monday and Tuesday and all repechages on Wednesday.Since all the course infrastructure has had to be removed in advance of the typhoon, all rowers are currently training on 114 ergometers that have been brought in for this purpose – a sight to see, I can imagine.Incidentally, it seems that typhoons are usually a rare occurrence in this area in August, but this has changed in the last few years:

FISA and the organisers had prepared for difficult conditions after an unusually high number of typhoons hit Japan in the months of July and August 2004. From 2000 to 2003, only two typhoons were observed in July and two in August while last year, 2004, a total of five typhoons during July and August hit Japan. During the ten years before 2000, there were very few, if any, typhoons in this period of time. 

Can you say global warming?