KEY POINTS:
This is where Formula One meets rowing.
On a nondescript wall in the defiantly low-tech surrounds of Lake Karapiro hang gadgets (sample pictured) that sit comfortably in the palm of a hand.
This hardware provides data that could, in little more than a year, prove the difference between
gold and silver at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The once-simple sport of rowing has just got a whole lot geekier. The Zen principle of athlete at one with the water has been replaced by pragmatic number crunching that focuses on angles, lengths and improvement that can be measured by thousandths of a second.
Gone are the days of the coach riding a bike beside the course, megaphone in hand. These days you're more likely to see Dick Tonks hooked up to his telemetry - technology that allows remote measurement and reporting of information - seeing who is working at their optimum, who is slacking, what it takes to make the damned boat go faster.
"For us, having coaches getting real-time data into the boat is a pretty powerful tool," said Rowing New Zealand high performance manager Andrew Matheson. "What we're seeing a lot of the time, is that the data is reinforcing what they're seeing with their eyes.
"It means they can track progress efficiently. If they make a technical change they can see the change in boatspeed immediately.
"Down in the single sculls they can get the heart-rate belt on and the coach can get real-time data on the heart rate of the athlete so he can have a real feel for what's going on out on the water."
Coaches like Tonks, who often work with more than one crew at a time, can load data into his system so he can get readings from whatever crew he is watching.
Telemetry systems have been the backbone of traditionally high-tech sports like motor-racing, with pit crews often knowing more about the performance and handling of the cars than the drivers. In rowing, New Zealand has been at the forefront of pushing the technological barriers.
"About four years ago, with the help of AUT, we were trying to develop this technology," Matheson said. "We ended up getting the precursor to these systems, cutting them in half and trying to put a telemetry system inside it.
"A lot of these ideas arguably came from our coaches. While we couldn't quite get it right it, spurred these guys on."
Another innovation is Forcegate, an electronic version of the standard gate on every boat that locks the oar in place. Forcegate is wired up to the telemetry and provides stroke by stroke analysis of the force applied by each rower.
"It also gives you the angles at which the blade is entering and leaving the water so when you're doing the fine-tuning of the crew, or gearing your boat or changing your set-up, it gives you more data."
When the coaches overlay video onto the data, the rower gets an immediate profile of what stroke is working and what isn't.
Even old-school coach Tonks, who admitted he hadn't fully learned how to read the data, is prepared to accept new school ways.
"It's a different world now, but I don't think it's changed the way we coach," Tonks said. "It's another way of looking at what we had already been able to see.
"For fine-tuning and helping the crews find that last few inches, it has been very helpful.
"What you see see with your eye is usually right but it has thrown up the odd interesting thing."
In the women's eight, they "shortened" the crew up in terms of body angles thinking it would shorten the length of the stroke.
"The stroke got longer. It went the other way to what we thought."
So you can teach the old dog a new trick or two.
