Lund University men’s and women’s rowers took home the trophy in this year’s Universitetskapprodden.
MALMÖ: On the morning of Saturday October 7, in the Malmö Rowing Club building overlooking the canal, student rowers from Lund and Uppsala universities mingled over a fika. The atmosphere was friendly; one would never expect that in just a few hours these young men and women would be speeding through the water in fierce competition with each, battling for the honor that comes with winning Universitetskapprodden (UK).
UK is an annual rowing regatta held between Lund University Rowing Club (LURK) and Uppsala Academic Rowing Society (UARS). This year, Lund University was victorious in both the women’s and men’s races.
The competition was originally inspired by The Boat Race, a regatta dating back to 1829 which is held annually between Cambridge and Oxford.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of UK. Lund and Uppsala alternate hosting the event – Uppsala in the even-numbered years and Lund in the odd – and this year’s race was hosted by LURK, at the Malmö Roddklub on the northeast corner of the Malmö canal. The type of races have varied over the years, but this year’s competition took the form of races in three heats of 500 meters each.
Lund’s women won 2/3 of their heats, after splitting the first two 1-1 and coming down to a tiebreaker for the third. The men’s race wasn’t as close; LURK won all three heats.
The weather was poor, with heavy cloudcover and a temperature of 10 degrees. Shortly before the women’s race was set to begin it started to rain. When asked if the weather would affect the rowers at all, Saskia Sydow, a rower for Lund, answered: “No. Totally not.” She said they had been training five days a week in similar weather in the lead-up to the race, and were prepared for it.
Asked how the women’s team felt going into the race, Clara Hübinger, LURK president and cox of the women’s boat, had this to say:
“We felt quite confident … we didn’t get as much practice time as I personally would have liked, but we practiced a lot of starts pieces and I think we were quite comfortable with those. Not everything went perfectly well during the race, but that’s natural because we have quite a lot of new rowers in the boat. It was the first race ever for four of the girls.”
LURK team member Michael Igoe said the men’s team felt similar:
“I think we went into the race quite confident, but that’s because we knew we had worked for it and had the advantage of having our boats and home turf.”
UARS had the following statement:
”We are happy with our effort this year, despite the loss. We did our best in the circumstances, and look forward to coming back stronger next year. Congratulations to LURK for a strong performance.”
