Rowing and canoeing

The seventeenth entry is a regata de fundo, and the two languages name the same race after two things that have nothing in common. Portuguese names the distance. De fundo is the standing modifier for an endurance event — a corrida de fundo, o meio-fundo, o nadador de fundo — and it says the effort is long, whatever the sport. The trap for an English reader is that o fundo on its own is the bottom of a thing, or the background of a picture, or a fund of money, so the phrase looks as though it belonged in a bank. English has no modifier of that kind at all. It has « long-distance » for the general idea, and for this race — crews sent off one after another against the clock rather than side by side — it has an idiom that mentions neither length nor time: « a head race », short for the « Head of the River » races that named the format. So a regata de fundo is « a head race », and a reader who takes « head » for a place in the results has the wrong word.