Fours Head 2017 – Junior Quads Review

On Sunday, a mighty 54 junior men’s quads took to racing down the 6.8km stretch of the infamous Tideway. Some crews will have been competing at this race for the experience, to post a respectable time and to set them up for some of the other big races, such as Schools Head and the Scullery, which are upcoming in the Head Racing Season. Other crews however, including those from Westminster, Shiplake College, Great Marlow and Tideway Scullers, were competing in order to gain the title of Fours Head Junior Quad Champions 2017.

As expected, the racing was quite tight across the category, with many crews finishing within seconds, or even milliseconds of each other. However, the St Paul’s School Boat Club crew proved their strength and speed with a triumphant win in this category, and proved that none of their other opposition had what it takes to beat them with a huge time margin of 9.1 seconds ahead of Leander Club “A”, who performed extremely well to finish in second place. Parish, De Graaf, Tarczy and Langstone-Bolt from St Paul’s will all be extremely proud of their performance, and their result, along with St Paul’s winning the Junior Fours, evidences that St Paul’s are the ones to beat for the rest of the 2017-2018 Rowing Season. The bronze medal position was taken by Maidenhead “A” who were pipped by Leander Club and lost out to them by a mere second. Nevertheless, Maidenhead Rowing Club will be pleased with their performance as they managed to beat their rivals, the Windsor Boys School with a reasonable time margin, and they will definitely see this as revenge for Windsor defeating them at National Schools’ Regatta and Henley Royal last season.

The race last Sunday not only proved to be exciting in terms of time margins between the competing crews, however an unusual set of events occurring in the category led to a slightly different set of results compared to usual. There was a strange, and potentially tactical move made by the King’s College School racing for “time only”. This crew achieved a respectable time of 20 minutes and 22.5 seconds, which would have placed them 33rd within the overall category, however their entry of racing for “time only” means that they haven’t been placed within the overall results table. It will be interesting to see how King’s College progress throughout the season, and whether this was potentially a tactical move which could make them the underdogs in the upcoming races throughout the rest of the season. Furthermore, I previously predicted that Eton College‘s junior quad would have a decent speed and would be able to post a respectable time, although they wouldn’t be able to place at the top of the results table. It has been reported that Eton’s quad impaled a Marshall’s launch at the Chiswick Pier Crossing and despite several warnings, the crew continued to race, even though they no longer had a bow ball attached to the end of their boat. The result of this very dramatic turn of events was that Eton College’s quad was disqualified and therefore we have no indication of this quad’s speed as their time was not posted.

Well done to all the crews who competed over the weekend and managed to row their hardest throughout the whole of the tough 6.8km course, with particular congratulations to St Paul’s for winning the category with a large margin, and Leander ‘A’ and Maidenhead for putting in incredibly strong performances to achieve 2nd and 3rd places respectively.

A full table of the (provisional) results can be viewed here below:

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