29 March 2025

By Tim Koch & Mel Brown

Tim Koch is at the keyboard and Mel Brown is behind the camera. All pictures © Mel Brown Studios unless otherwise stated. 

Eighteen days before the CHANEL J12 Boat Race 2025, twenty men and sixteen women (two male coxes in the women’s crews!) were finally named as those who will be in their club’s Blue Boats for the 79th Women’s Boat Race or the 170th Men’s Boat Race on 13 April. 

The Women’s Crews

The Men’s Crews

Cambridge have put the names of their reserve crews, Goldie for the men and Blondie for the women, on the CUBC website. Blondie has one Old Blue onboard, Carina Graf, while Goldie has four: James Trotman, Matt Edge, Thomas Marsh and Brett Taylor. It is interesting that CUBC Men’s coach Rob Baker is confident enough to put four winning Blues in his reserve crew. I cannot find any details of the Oxford reserve crews, Isis and Osiris.

As widely reported recently, on 18 and 19 March, six members of the CUBC Squad, five openweight rowers and a cox for the lightweights, were controversially declared ineligible to race.

Possibly, the biggest loss to Cambridge may have been Tom Ford who stroked the potential men’s Blue Boat when they raced a Dutch national team on 2 March. He was a Gold Medalist in the GB eight at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Having Ford in the stroke seat for the Dutch fixture was perhaps an indication that coach Rob Baker was seriously considering him for that position on Boat Race Day.

Douwe de Graaf was at “6” for the 2 March fixture but is now named as stroke for the Cambridge men. He spent four years in the first Varsity boat at Harvard and is part of the GB Olympic Development Squad. This will be his first Boat Race though he knows the course well having learnt to row at St. Paul’s School sited at the race’s halfway point.

The other excluded male openweight, Matt Heywood, was not included in the 2 March fixture races in either the potential Blue or reserve boats. Of the three excluded women rowers, on 2 March CUBC Women’s President Lucy Havard was in the “3” seat of the potential reserve crew but Jenna Armstrong and Molly Foxell were not in the first or the second boats. Naturally, there may have been non-rowing reasons for the absence of these four from the fixtures.

Also on the 26 March, the Boat Race Company issued the following statement:

Following considerable media and social media coverage over issues of eligibility last week, everyone within Oxford University Boat Club and Cambridge University Boat Club is focusing firmly on the races in April…

Following this year’s races, as usual we will meet to review rules and processes, to ensure maximum clarity for the future. We create rules which are intended to respect the integrity and original spirit of The Boat Race, balanced against the ambitions of talented rowers pursuing their academic goals.

A seemingly well-informed Guardian article on the same day reported that:

An independent legal opinion has concluded there are “strong grounds to challenge the lawfulness” of the decision to ban three (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) Cambridge students from taking part in next month’s Boat Race.

But it added:

With just over two weeks until the race Cambridge have no plans to act on the legal opinion at this stage as mounting a legal challenge would be time-consuming and potentially disruptive to the squad, but they are reserving all options for the future…

End of topic until after 13 April, I think.

Before and after last year’s Boat Race, much publicity was given to tests of the water along the course from Putney to Mortlake which revealed high levels of E. coli, which can cause a range of serious infections. The event at Battersea saw both boat clubs and the Boat Race Company give their support to the London Rivers’ Pledge, a commitment to cleaning up the city’s waterways. The Pledge is a partnership between environmental campaigners, those who use or enjoy London’s waterways and the key firms and authorities that manage them. The Thames Tideway Tunnel is now fully connected and it claims that it is already delivering huge benefits to the Thames in terms of sewage reduction. The 25km long “super sewer” is designed to reduce sewage discharges in the Thames by 95%.

The Boat Race is on Sunday, 13 April, with the Women’s Blues starting at 13.21 and the Men’s Blues at 14.21.

Mel Brown has produced a spectator’s tailored guide to the day “with the knowledge of a local rower.”