WE'RE ON THE ROW TO NOWHERE

On Easter Saturday, rowing eights from Oxford and Cambridge universities will engage in the 143rd annual Boat Race, slicing through the muddy Thames water from Putney Bridge to Mortlake at about 13mph. In the six months prior to their big day, both teams will have spent about 600 hours in the gym, and rowed approximately 3,000 miles in training sessions. So far, so unsurprising. But how many of the seven million TV viewers watching the traditional set-to between the Light and Dark Blues next weekend will know that those young men will also have spent much of the last six months rowing hard - yet going precisely nowhere? For one of the sport's most valuable training tools is a stationary boat bristling with oars full of holes: aka The Tank.

Hard by London's Hammersmith Bridge is St Paul's Boys School tank. Despite the public-school accoutrements (lined up on the walls are 100 years' worth of school first-eight photographs, crews all smartly turned out in white blazers) there is a raw and brutal feel about the place, reminiscent of the great boxing gyms of New York, Havana or the Old Kent Road; it has the same musty male smell of sweat and effort which emanates from all those involved in physically demanding sports. Right now those doing the sweating are the current Oxford team, pictured here with their Dutch Olympic coach Rene Mijnders (standing), as they prepare for the race on Saturday.

Not unlike the galley of a slave ship, the rowing tank is the first port of call for most budding rowers. While not many of Britain's 450 rowing clubs have one, the tank is the ideal way to teach the fundamentals of the sport to novices. But - much to the embarrassment of some top international rowers, who feel their achievements have put them beyond such an elementary teaching aid - coaches also like to use the tank with seasoned crews, to help get across some of the finer points of technique which have proved hard to communicate out on the river. So even great Olympians such as Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent will have churned the stagnant waters of the tank.

For the coach, the tank is one of the rare places where he can get close to his athletes in action. The normal situation - of rowers in boat and coach on bike or in launch bellowing down a loudhailer - is replaced by a more intimate, tactile relationship, where the coach can position his athletes' hands, shoulders and body-swing movements, adjusting and readjusting until they are at just the right pitch and angle. No shouting in wind and rain from a muddy towpath - here is the ideal opportunity for hands- on teaching on a stable, indoor stage.

Here he can walk up and down the centre aisle, bending here and there for a quiet word, or to rectify with a touch a technical fault, as his crew of eight work the oars against a heavy resistance of dead water. The spoons of the oars are holed, Gruyere-like, to ease that resistance by letting water pour through; but the "feel" of the movements replicate those in a boat on the water - minus the unsteadiness of a rolling, tilting work platform. (Some years ago, while students rowing for Oxford, my team- mates and I fooled a gullible journalist - from a respected national newspaper - by taking a set of these tank-specific oars out in the eight on the river: "Interests of boat speed," we told him. "Our coach believes that the water passing through the holes will set up a back eddy to propel the oars faster through the water." We never found out if his "scoop" made the back page.)

Eighteen months ago, the tank at the London Rowing Club (which looks very like the one at St Paul's - they all tend to be made to the same specification) met a new challenge. For it was here that the actors from the rowing movie True Blue (already lined up to be that year's Royal Command Performance) learnt about technique, swing and the maddeningly complicated art of rowing in unison. Six weeks later, once filming had started, the actors had been transformed into a finely drilled crew; more unexpectedly, at each nightly viewing of the film's rushes they would express far more concern about their rowing technique than about the number of close-ups they had. An unlikely, but ultimately pleasing tribute to the power of The Tank.