Through their time in rowing, most athletes and coaches will develop an inherent understanding of the effort/skill/fitness required to achieve a given score for an erg test. As a male rower starting to do more coaching, I wanted a better understanding of female erg scores and to have a good way to compare between the sexes, to help give myself and my athletes better context of everyone’s erg scores.
In order to do this, I scraped the verified scores from the Concept2 logbook rankings website from 2016-2024, and took the top 10%-ile scores for each year, as this tended to be the threshold of where “performance”-oriented senior rowing starts (at least in my head). Over 2km, this was around 6:50 for male and 8:00 for female athletes. I have additionally removed all but the fastest entry for each athlete as a number of athletes had multiple entries in each of the distances over the sampled time period.
This data is presented in the form of an ECDF. You should be able to mouse-over the curves to see how a score on one curve translates to the other for the same percentile of athlete for 1km, 2km, and 5km tests.
Some general expected differences can be drawn from this for comparison of erg times between senior male and female athletes, 13s for the 2km and 5km tests and 16-17s for the 1km test.
There are a number of critiques can could be levied at this analysis, non-equal numbers of male and female data-points, lack of data at the higher perciles of athletes due to national-team secrecy, reliance on self reported sex etc. Even with this, these distributions are likely a decent guide for where senior athletes sit relative to their peers.