Oxford Brookes A Sporting Miracle: From a cowshed on the Thames to the top of the rowing world

Chapter 1

Jenny and Sam

‘I learnt to row at Reading, learnt to race at Hartpury – and learnt to win at Brookes.’ (Jenny Bates, Brookes athlete, GB international and Henley winner)

Off to Hartpury we go …

Jenny Bates grew up near the Thames in Reading, enjoyed sport generally, particularly swimming, and, aged 17, thought she would try rowing. But Reading Rowing Club had no room for novices at that time. However, she saw an article about the GB Rowing World Class Start programme, designed to get young athletes into rowing. She went along to the session in 2016 and quickly got hooked on this new sport.

She was athletic and strong, but although tall by most standards (personally, I dream of being 1.78 m), that height wasn’t quite what the programme was looking for, with 1.80 m being considered the minimum for women. But she was highly competitive, and when other girls at the trial session started boasting about how well they were going to do, she vowed to do better. Which she did, and was accepted into the programme.

Her days as a novice were fun, although it wasn’t all success – including lots of falling into the river as she learnt how to scull. But she met Olympic gold medal winner Helen Glover, her role model, who was of similar height and build, which spurred her on.

Bates decided that she wanted to apply to a university that would allow her to develop her rowing. She chose to study Physical Education and School Sport at Hartpury University in Gloucestershire, which started life as an agricultural college but developed a strong reputation for sport and business degrees, as well as everything connected with animals and agriculture.

That same autumn of 2017, the slightly younger Sam Sheppard also arrived at Hartpury, but as a boarder in the sixth-form College. He had learnt to row in East Sussex and then chose Hartpury – just like Bates – because of the College’s reputation for rowing. Both Bates and Sheppard enjoyed rowing at Hartpury, and Bates enjoyed some success. She raced in the British indoor championships, improved her erg times, and got fit and strong. She rowed in a single scull and also in a quad scull, her crew won some events, rowed at Henley Women’s Regatta and the Universities Championships.

But moving into her second year, she contracted mumps, which made her face blow up like a ‘real-life fat-face filter’, as she put it, but also left her with serious health issues. She suffered from post-viral costochondritis, an inflammation of the chest cartilage, and was out of rowing for around 18 months, half of her time at Hartpury. And when she did return, medics even wondered whether she had cerebral palsy because of her slightly unusual rowing style. She somewhat lost interest in her sport, and then in her third year at Hartpury, in early 2020, Covid struck. Her last few months, supposedly at Hartpury, were spent mainly at home, in lockdown.

Meanwhile, Sheppard improved his rowing during his two years at Hartpury and then chose Oxford Brookes largely for rowing reasons, arriving in September 2019 to study Sports and Exercise Science. But halfway through his first year, Covid meant a pause in serious rowing competition for Brookes.

New beginnings at Brookes

In the early summer of 2020, Bates returned home to Reading to find her father had taken up indoor rowing to keep fit during lockdown. That provided a challenge for Bates – she didn’t want to let her dad beat her on the erg times! She also got back into running and cycling, and started feeling fit and strong again. She got a job as a carer, and set up a pick’n’mix sweets business with her best friend, Elle Nash, who was already at Brookes.

But, after her disappointment at Hartpury, she was ready to say goodbye to her rowing career and had a place at Saint Mary’s University in Twickenham lined up to study for a teaching qualification. However, in the summer of 2020, on the weekend that should have been the climax of the (cancelled) Henley Regatta, she and Nash decided to run a marathon to raise money for the MIND charity. By an amazing coincidence, the distance from the Brookes boathouse at Cholsey to the iconic Leander Club in Henley, via the Thames towpath, is exactly the marathon distance.

The day before the run the pair were in Henley and happened to meet Henry Bailhache-Webb, head rowing coach at Brookes. They told him of their plans for the next day. ‘I’ve never run a marathon,’ said Henry. ‘I’ll join you tomorrow!’ (Can you imagine being fit enough to just decide on the spur of the moment that you will run a marathon the next day?)

Anyway, the three of them ran together, with Henry complaining most of the way that he was struggling to run at such a slow pace. He did prove useful though because ‘he held the gates open for us and he knew the way’, as Bates puts it! And by the time the runners arrived at Henley, Bates had decided. Forget St Mary’s, she was going to Brookes in the autumn to do a Masters – and get back into rowing.

She was welcomed into the club, loved it, and all initially went well. The crew’s time on the water was still limited because of Covid, so there was lots or cycling and working outdoors on the ergs. In early 2021, her crew came third in the intermediate category at the British Universities (BUCS) regatta, which was a decent result, Bates thought. But the day after the event, back in Oxford, Richard Chambers, then the coach of the women’s squad, read out the crew lists for the next event. Bates had been dropped from her boat.

‘It wasn’t handled particularly sensitively, I had no warning, it was just announced. And at that stage, the women’s and men’s squads weren’t joined up as well as they are now,’ she remembers. ‘I was disappointed, but I knew Brookes always made the best decisions for the boat, and everything was based on data.’ The results from the telemetry in the BUCS event made her one of the weakest members of the crew, and other women in a lower Brookes boat deserved promotion into her seat.

Bates was supported by friends and colleagues in the club, who assured her that she would bounce back. But initially it did not look that way. She found a place in a four, but over the following weeks her crewmates were moved into other boats, and eventually she was left on her own as a sculler – she had done some sculling at Hartpury, but it was not her specialism really. At the Wimbleball training camp in May 2021, she was on her own, feeling lonely as she sculled along behind whilst other eights and quads trained on the lake.

Ups and downs …

Sheppard had a slightly less stressful year with OBUBC, but it was not trouble free. He struggled with motivation during the Covid period when athletes were training from home or largely on their own, so came back to Brookes with a lot of work to do to get back to racing fitness. By the time the delayed Henley Regatta took place in August 2021, he was rowing in the Prince Albert Cup coxed four ‘B’ boat. The four beat Aberdeen University but then came up against the Brookes ‘A’ boat, with the expected result.

At that event, the Brookes top women’s eight won the inaugural Island Challenge Cup for student women. Bates was delighted – she bought into the philosophy at Brookes that everybody contributes to success, and that meant she was delighted for the club and the athletes. She remembers Jordan Simper from that crew telling her, ‘Your time will come, Jenny!’

That still didn’t seem likely, and at the beginning of the 2021/22 season things got worse for Bates. She caught Covid, followed by lingering post-viral health issues. She felt supported by the club, but it got to the point where she came close to dropping out of university – and rowing – altogether.

By now, Hugo Gulliver had joined as coach for the women’s squad. He brought the squad closer to the men’s squad, and his emphasis was on making rowing fun. He was also responsible for getting Bates back into the boat, even if he achieved it in a slightly underhand manner! He called her one evening in early December.

‘Jenny, I’ve got a problem. There’s been an injury, I’m a rower short for the Bristol Head this Saturday. I need you in the boat.’

‘Hugo, I haven’t been in a boat for months! I can’t do that.’

‘Jenny, you don’t want to let down the others, do you? They’ll be so disappointed if we can’t compete.’

So, with some trepidation, Bates was back on the water. The two Brookes women’s boats finished first and second at the event, and Bates was hooked again. By the summer of 2022, her crew, the Brookes women’s ‘B’ boat, won the intermediate eights at BUCS and at Henley Women’s Regatta. At Henley Royal Regatta the ‘B’ crew gave their own ‘A’ crew a good race in the third round of the Island Cup. Bates and her colleagues pushed the first boat all the way, but lost by just over a length.

Sheppard, by now, was in his third year, enjoying rowing, but for much of the year he perhaps did not train as hard as he could. At that same Henley in 2022, he rowed in the Brookes ‘B’ crew in the Temple Cup, which delivered a great win over old rival Imperial College in the second round, but then lost to Durham University’s first boat.

As summer 2022 approached, he decided to stay on and do a master’s at Brookes, and he stepped up his effort in the gym. By the end of that academic year he was impressing Bailhache-Webb with his results. As the students disappeared off for the summer, the coach took him aside. If he continued training at this level, ‘Sam, you’ll be a monster next year.’

Sheppard was motivated by that confidence in him. When the students returned, he told his housemates that he was going to be selected for the Temple ‘A’ crew this year and they were going to win at Henley. His housemates weren’t convinced, as Sheppard had not always applied himself 100 per cent, but something had clicked and he was enjoying himself, even in the gym.

‘Training is a means to an end. You wouldn’t do it on your own, without something to work for. But the atmosphere and the camaraderie around training at Brookes is so great, it keeps you going. It’s competitive, but you’re working with your best mates, even if you know you are going for the same seats in the boat.’

Despite the intensity of the programme, the coaches at Brookes try to ensure lives aren’t ‘consumed by rowing’, as Sheppard puts it. Athletes socialise together, have dinner together, and having rowers around who have been there for several years and have already won major events is motivating for everyone.

But in rowing, the coach can only do so much. Ultimately, it’s up to the individual. It is the personal drive, determination and commitment that matters. As Sheppard says, ‘Only you have the power to decide how hard and well you’re going to train.’ However, a great coach can help athletes get themselves to that place where they want to push themselves to the limit.

Henley 2023 – the light at the end of the tunnel?

As the 2022/23 season started, Gulliver was really bringing the women’s squad together, and helping Bates develop her technique. ‘I’ve always had the power, I could see that in my erg times, but my technique wasn’t good enough to let me apply it as well as I should,’ she says. In November 2022, she decided to enter the GB national trials, in which athletes have to compete in single sculling boats. She borrowed a boat and headed off to Boston in Lincolnshire without any great expectations.

To everyone’s surprise, not least her own, and as an unknown in national rowing terms, she came sixth. ‘The GB coaches kept checking their watches, they couldn’t believe it,’ she remembers. She was faster than several current members of the GB squad, and having been close to giving up rowing just a few months earlier, suddenly Bates was being talked about as a future Olympian.

Meanwhile, Sheppard had made another decision at the beginning of the 2022/23 season. As well as pushing himself harder this year, he decided he would give up competitive rowing after Henley 2023. This actually was part of the motivation for him to work to the maximum during the year – he knew this was his last chance of winning a major prize.

One day Richard Spratley took him aside in the gym. ‘Are you really not going to row next year? If so, do you fancy doing some coaching?’

Sheppard hadn’t really thought about it, but if Spratley had seen some potential in him, it seemed worth giving it a go. That’s why, a year later, he is coaching at Brookes, the latest piece in the jigsaw as Spratley looks to maintain the coaching continuity that has served the club well in recent years.

Back to 2023 and, in the run up to Henley 2023, the Temple crew trained with the Ladies’ Plate crew, the most senior of the full-time Brookes men’s boats. ‘We often would beat them in training races,’ remembers Sheppard. ‘But whenever it came to a crunch event, and a real race, on the day, they would step it up and beat us.’ That training would prove useful when it came to Henley itself.

In the women’s squad, Bates was in the ‘A’ crew training for the Island Cup at Henley, alongside Arianna Forde, also promoted from the previous year’s ‘B’ crew. It’s interesting to note that three women who were in the ‘A’ crew in 2022 rowed in the ‘B’ boat the following year – that shows the Brookes objectivity and ruthlessness coming into play again, but this time to the benefit of Bates. Yet the athletes accept their fate, and seem to genuinely put the best interests of the club ahead of their own feelings. And that top crew was beating everybody in sight in early 2023, winning BUCS by three lengths and beating Harvard, Leander and Thames to win the top event at the Henley Women’s Regatta.

So how did Bates and Sheppard and their crews perform at Henley Royal Regatta in 2023? Well, you might have guessed the answer by now, but you can read the race reports for the Temple final on page X, and for the Island final on page Y.

Jenny Bates (©AllMarkOne)

Sam Sheppard (©AllMarkOne)

The Brookes secret

How does Bates explain the success of Brookes? ‘We keep each other accountable. People post photos of the extra training they’re doing on group chats, and everyone is really supportive. We trained with the top rowers and watched them win when we were starting at Brookes; now the new recruits look at us in the same way. It’s about role models. We help and push each other up – but we have fun too.’

That squad aspect is emphasised by Sheppard too. ‘I’ve been training from the beginning here with guys who have won gold medals at world under-23 championships. Seeing what they do pulls the standard for everybody up. But equally, the folks towards the bottom of the squad also work hard and the pressure from them pushes us all in that same positive direction too!’

For instance, the Brookes men’s sixth boat finished sixteenth out of 300 boats in the 2022 Head of the River race on the London Tideway – faster than all but three other UK university first boats! So being at the ‘bottom’ of the Brookes squad is still a pretty impressive place to be.

Both Bates and Sheppard have had amazing opportunities and experiences. They’ve competed against Olympic rowers, raced in Shanghai, at the San Diego Crew Classic, at regattas around Europe as well as Henley, BUCS and domestic events. These are not experiences many student athletes enjoy, in any sport, anywhere.

We will have more on what Bates has been up to in 2024 later. But let’s just say the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics is very much on her radar. And Sheppard is finishing his master’s, looking forward to at least a few years of coaching, and maybe more. Who knows, he might prove to be the Spratley or Bailhache-Webb of the 2030s and 2040s …

Chapter 2

Rowing Hurts

‘Marathon runners talk about hitting the wall at the twenty-third mile of the race. What rowers confront isn’t a wall; it’s a hole – an abyss of pain, which opens up in the second minute of the race. Large needles are being driven into your thigh muscles, while your forearms seem to be splitting. Then the pain becomes confused and disorganized, not like the windedness of the runner or the leg burn of the biker but an all-over, savage unpleasantness.’ (Ashleigh Teitel, writer and rower, quoted on the 10morestrokes website)¹

Rowing hurts

On hearing I was writing this book, Sheena Smith, a friend who rowed seriously for the University of Washington two decades ago and still coaches today, told me I really should emphasise the pain of rowing up-front to help non-rowing readers understand what it is all about. She said this:

‘I’d love to read about the physicality of what it’s like to pull along the weight of both boat and cox – knives in the lungs, burning quads, calluses ripping on hands, sweat dripping, a million annoyances and adjustments that you can’t do anything about and must tune out, because once you’re in the race, rowers can’t stop …’

Every sport is unique by definition, but rowing genuinely has unusual attributes. First of all, it really, really hurts, more than pretty much any other sport, partly because few other activities use virtually every muscle in the body. Swimming comes close, but even that does not replicate the way rowing engages the legs, the arms (right down to the fingertips, literally), upper and lower body, stomach, back, even the neck and head muscles keeping your head as still as possible. The sport is intense and punishing on your entire body.

Perhaps because of this, it is one of the few sports where athletes can and do reasonably regularly throw up, collapse or even pass out, as we saw in the 2024 Boat Race, where the Cambridge stroke, Matt Edge, was virtually in a zombie state for the last two minutes of the race. Fortunately, Cambridge held on to win and he recovered quickly.

Rowing the classic 2,000-metre course in a race means setting off like a 100-metre sprinter, then settling into maybe an 800-metre runner level of exertion, followed by a last 30 seconds of flat-out sprinting effort again, but with every muscle in your body contributing. Rowing a head race over 15 or 20 minutes means a less dramatic initial effort – but pain for longer!

And it is not just the muscles. There is good chance that your hands will be covered in blisters for much of the season. You will bang your hands and shins on parts of the boat that suddenly leap out to attack you. You might expect back problems to be a major issue, which they are, but tendonitis in the hands is one of the most common ailments.

Yet it is strangely addictive. One athlete at the Brookes boathouse told me she had suffered a succession of injuries. ‘I decided to give up rowing last year. I stopped for a whole month. But I was so bored, I missed it so much!’ She is now hoping to work her way back up the hierarchy of Brookes boats, subject to maintaining her health and fitness.

Trust is everything

Then, unless you are rowing on your own in a sculling boat, there is the team aspect. You can’t stop, as my friend said. This is the second part of the great Ashleigh Teitel quote at the top of this chapter:

‘As you pass the five-hundred-meter mark, with three-quarters of the race still to row, you realize with dread that you are not going to make it to the finish, but at the same time the idea of letting your teammates down by not rowing your hardest is unthinkable … Therefore, you are going to die. Welcome to this life.’

Teitel captures there one of the essential psychological aspects of rowing. Unlike many team sports (football, rugby, cricket, basketball), one amazing individual can’t drive victory, but again unlike those sports, one really bad performance will cost the team the win. So the pressure on everyone to perform for the sake of their colleagues is intense. That means trust is vital and central to rowing. I must trust my crew mates if we are going to succeed. When I feel like I might die imminently, even a momentary thought that someone else is not working as hard can lose the race.

Even if a crew is leading, a couple of athletes thinking ‘I can take it easy now, we’ve got this’, can let the opposition back into the race. That is why team spirit, collaboration and the bonds within clubs and crews are vital to successful rowing, and the friendships formed in rowing clubs and crews tend to last a lifetime. (Later, the GB Olympic team performance at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics will be discussed, an example where maybe that team spirit was not in evidence.)

But on the positive side, the sensation when a high-quality boat is really travelling is brilliant, even if you are merely the cox, as I was. Off the start in a race, you feel the G-force acceleration and de-acceleration of every stroke in the cox’s seat, as you are bumped forwards and backwards into the back of your seat (wear some padding …). On a calm, sunny day, the boat seems to glide across the surface of the water, four or eight rowers moving as one.

It is a great experience, as is winning a significant race. The sheer decibels of the Henley Stewards’ Enclosure crowd shouting you on in a close finish, or even the Cambridge Bumps spectators gathered around Grassy Corner, cheering as you go for the bump, is incredible. But equally, losing, when you have given your absolute all for six minutes or more, is an awful feeling.

In my first year coxing at Henley for Lady Margaret Boat Club, we came from two lengths down to beat our biggest Cambridge rivals. That felt good. The following year, another College unexpectedly did exactly the same to us. I am not exaggerating to say that was one of the worst moments of my life, and no miserable work experience, for instance, has ever come close to that intense psychological pain.

Here is another excellent description of how it feels, in this case rowing a 2,000-metre ‘race’ on the erg machine, but it applies just as well to rowing on the water. (It is attributed to Lewis Hynes, although I have not found the original.) Here is one section describing the third quarter of the race:

‘If you are going to fail it will be here. You don’t, but the loss of all hope of control, despair of ever going faster, and the fear of failure; all combine, react and ignite in your tinder-dry throat, the flames leaping into your chest and scorching it raw. The skin on the back of your forearms and shins goosepimples up, some bizarre atavistic reaction to the acid poisoning your blood. You are being drowned by your own exertions, burned alive from within by the byproducts of your muscles, and you must not, will not, ever let it stop. This is the wilderness, the third 500 m, an eternal, blasted wasteland. It is a black place, hope is abandoned, logic is absent, pain is eternal. It is the entrance to the hole that is the last 500 m.’

So, there are intense highs and lows for serious athletes in this sport, but fundamentally, rowing hurts. Bear that in mind as the story of Brookes unfolds and remember that every victory and loss featured here really, really hurt. So how coaches persuade athletes to go through that pain barrier, time after time, working for themselves and for their teammates, is a critical success factor for any serious rowing crew or club.

Chapter 3

The Poly

‘Putting up a poster we found three other people with basic rowing knowledge who wanted to row. We were effectively all novices.’ (Nick Ryan, quoted by Clive Couldwell in the Taurus newsletter, 2011)

The Poly

In the beginning, there was the Poly.

Oxford Polytechnic always had to fight for recognition alongside its illustrious neighbour, the University of Oxford, an ancient establishment founded in the eleventh century, in the days of William the Conqueror. The forerunner institutions to the Poly date back only as far as the Oxford School of Art in 1865 and, having merged with several other colleges, the institution became a fully-fledged Polytechnic in 1970, with strengths in technology and business as well as health and social sciences.

In the mid-1970s, a number of keen rowers who had competed at school arrived at the Poly. But there was no boat club, so some like Hayden Morris, who joined City of Oxford, gravitated towards local clubs. But in 1978, Morris went along to the Freshers Fair with some leaflets and a positive attitude, and found a number of like-minded oarsmen who were keen to start a club. Nick Ryan, Russell Cooke and Alasdair Davies joined Morris, and founded the Oxford Polytechnic Boat Club (OPBC). Quickly, other founding members including Clive Couldwell, Martin Durgan, David Cooke and Charles Stimpson came on board.

The club was led by Ryan, as the inaugural Captain of Boats. Sixty enthusiastic novices, men and women, were recruited via an advert in the student’s union, and even after some drop outs, the club was quickly one of the bigger sports clubs at the Poly. The only problems were a lack of boats, premises and money.

The City of Oxford club wasn’t interested in helping, but others were more generous. The athletes were given their first home by the Oxford Falcon Rowing and Canoeing Club, itself a club with a lengthy and interesting history, as the oldest Oxford ‘town’ rowing club.² The first competitions were entered as a composite Polytechnic/Falcon crew, even though crews were in fact 100 per cent Poly athletes. Cook borrowed a boat from his old school, Reading Blue Coat, and other founders used their connections at schools such as Monmouth. Some Oxford Colleges were also helpful.

It was all somewhat hand to mouth though. Cook remembers being stopped by the police on the Marlow bypass having ‘borrowed’ a trailer from the Marlow Rowing Club! But the club was established now and, in the 1979–80 season, Oxford Polytechnic/Falcon won the novice men’s fours at Monmouth Regatta and novice women’s fours at Stratford-upon-Avon. The Poly was on its way in the world of rowing.

By the next season, Tim Magee, who had both rowed and coached, got involved, and a sponsored row enabled the club to buy their first boat, christened Oxpolycarbonate. It was an old GB squad training boat, that ‘we picked up for next to nothing’, says Couldwell.

In that 1980–81 season, the Poly tried to persuade Boris Rankov, captain of Oxford University Boat Club, that the Poly should be allowed to row in the University’s bumping races. He wasn’t keen, but he agreed that a Poly crew could enter the annual Oriel Regatta – which they promptly won! It is not the most serious rowing event in the world, but when a huge cup was presented to ‘the Poly’, it was accompanied by almost total silence from the assembled (and shocked) University students. ‘Only St Hilda’s cheered, because I was coaching them,’ remembers Magee.

The club entered Henley and by chance came up against Oriel College. Sadly the Poly lost this time. ‘We rarely had the same crew one week to the next in those early days,’ says Morris today. But the club started entering British Polytechnic Sports Association events, and won championship events at the annual regatta through the 1980s.

Those early days seem like a world away from the experience of Brookes athletes today. But every success story starts with a few faltering steps, and talking to the founders today, they are still rightly proud of the essential role they played in this story.

By the time Alex and Jane Gandon arrived in the mid-eighties, the Poly had a decent men’s first eight. Boat bargain-hunting continued with the purchase of an old South