26 June 2025

By Tim Koch

With less than a week before the 174th Henley (Royal) Regatta, the Stewards have put out a press release previewing this year’s entries:

This summer’s Henley Royal Regatta sees an incredible 768 Entries from 19 nations, including a record 589 domestic Entry and 179 from overseas. 4,367 athletes will compete in 404 races across the six-day Regatta. 

This year the Regatta sees another new event, The Bridge Challenge Plate, which is the women’s equivalent of the open Ladies’ Challenge Plate, i.e. an intermediate eights event. The eleven entries are all from Britain and include this year’s Cambridge Women’s Blue Boat with a crew unchanged from April.

(A reminder that Henley now classes events as Premier, Intermediate, Club and Student. Also, an “Open” event means that it is in theory open to both men and women, this is in line with British Rowing protocols). 

Richard Phelps, the new Chair of the Committee of Management for Henley Royal Regatta, said of the Bridge:

This new event reinforces Henley Royal Regatta’s commitment to achieving gender parity on the water. This provides a much-needed bridge between the top Premier events and our Club/Student events and it’s great to see so many British clubs raise their game in order to be the first holders of this trophy. 

The Diamond Sculls (Premier Open Single Sculls) has forty-one entries and sees the strongest field for many years. It includes the Olympic gold medallists from Tokyo (Stefanos Ntouskos) and Paris (Olli Zeidler). Zeidler will be after his fifth win in this event, one short of the records set by Stuart “Sam” Mackenzie, 1957 – 1962, and Mahé Drysdale between 2006 and 2018.

The Princess Royal (Premier Women’s Single Sculls) includes a bronze medalist from Paris, Viktorija Senkuté of Lithuania, but the press release is bullish about Britain’s Lauren Henry and says that she is “arguably the favourite to win” after winning gold by more than eight seconds at the World Rowing Cup this month. Only two Britons have won the event since its inception in 1993.

In the Junior Eights, the Princess Elizabeth for the boys and the Prince Philip for the girls, attention will be on Shiplake College to see if they can repeat their double win of Boys and Girls Championship Eights at the National Schools Regatta.

In club eights, the open Thames Cup and the women’s Wargrave Cup, the question is, will Thames RC’s dominance continue? It has won the Wargrave for the last three years and the Thames for the last two – and six times in the last nine regattas.

I have left the prestigious Grand Challenge Cup (Premier Open Eights) for last as this year it will be of particular interest to HTBS Types. There are four entries, Rowing Australia, Hollandia Roeiclub, a Molesey and Oxford University composite and Cambridge University.

Writing on Junior Rowing News, Tom Morgan summed up the entries:

The reigning world and Olympic champions from Great Britain, albeit with an entirely different outfit, will take on the best that the Netherlands (Olympic silver medallists) and Australia can offer. Throw into the mix a much-hyped outfit from Cambridge University with Olympic gold medallist Tom Ford… and Saturday’s racing promises to be tasty.

Not long after the last Boat Race, there were rumours of the victorious Cambridge men’s crew planning something special. I assumed that this meant that they were going to enter the Ladies’ Plate. In 2024, Cambridge entered the Temple (Student Open Eights) but good results at the Metropolitan and BUCS Regattas meant that the Stewards put them in the intermediate eights, the Ladies’ Plate – where they lost in the final.

However, it seems that this year coach Rob Baker has put his top eight not in Student or Intermediate but in Premier – The Grand no less. Quoted on the CUBC website, he said:

After making the final of the Ladies Plate in 2024, we have been able to push our summer training even further this season. To have two eights racing is a great testament to the work the guys have put in. Entering the Grand in a year when there will be international crews is a tall order, but we feel it’s a unique crew, and we want to race the best. Selecting Tom Ford after a tough year for him is a particular pleasure.

The crew has only two changes from Boat Race Day, Luke Beever and Gabriel Maher have been replaced by Paris Olympic Champion Tom Ford and winning Goldie 5-man Tom Macky. Ford was almost certainly a choice for the Boat Race, but he was controversially declared ineligible.

CUBC has won the Grand three times, but not since 1858. It is a fact that fourteen Cambridge Colleges have won Henley’s most historically prestigious prize, but the last was Lady Margaret in 1951. Can a true university club win The Grand in modern times? 

Brookes and Brookes composites have won the Grand for the last four years and two of those crews beat internationals (Australia and Canada). They also included the man currently in the Cambridge six seat, Tom Ford. Strictly speaking however, Brookes is an open club. The last Grand winning crew composed entirely of students was the University of London in 1992. 

Rob Baker has called his current crew “unique”. For Cambridge to win they would not have to be unique (a state that is probably only possible for snowflakes) but they would have to be pretty special – which they have been so far.