The Fours Head of the River Race is one of my favourites in the Winter calendar. Utilising the full extent of the Championship Course, it’s a long, hard-fought grind, over one of the most famous stretches of river in the world, without the benefit of a full eight. It’s prolonged suffering at its finest.
Importantly, the Championship categories also see some of the most stacked fields in the domestic racing calendar. Here, everyone comes out to play – including Caversham-based athletes who return to their old stomping grounds in the hopes of winning bragging rights over their national team peers. The Coxless Fours add further complexity – steering the right line on the Tideway can make or break a race, which becomes markedly more difficult without a cox.
This year we have a pretty formidable field in the Championship Coxless Fours, even if it’s slightly smaller than usual. As always, I will highlight the crews that I think pose the most ‘threat’ for this event before offering a finish order prediction for the top three.
Leander Club (L)
This entry looks to be Leander‘s top coxless four, with the provisional lineup entered as Jack Prior, Miles Beeson, Josh Bowesman-Jones and Dan Graham. These guys are all massively experienced athletes. Prior is a multiple Henley Royal Regatta and U23 World Rowing Championships winner with Oxford Brookes University Boat Club (his move to the Pink Palace will, I’m sure, have been a source of some consternation for his old team), and is now based at Caversham as part of the new group of Olympic hopefuls looking towards LA 2028. Beeson studied at Yale, where he took home several Eastern Sprints, Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta titles, and some U23 golds before his move to Leander. Graham is the longest-serving Leander athlete and also has plenty of international experience through the age groups, with his senior debut made in 2023. He also won The Ladies’ Challenge Plate with Leander at Henley Royal Regatta in 2022. Bowesman-Jones is entering his third season with Leander; he was a Dark Blue at Oxford University Boat Club for his undergraduate degree, racing in the Blue Boat in Ely in 2021 and beating Goldie in the Reserve Race in 2022. He was a U23 World Champion in 2021 and most recently was in The Visitors’ Challenge Cup-winning Leander boat over the summer. There’s a tremendous amount of pedigree here on paper, and a few of these guys – Prior, Beeson and Graham in particular – will still be smarting from losses to Brookes – the big competition here and throughout the season – at Henley Royal Regatta. I expect to see a big performance from these guys, and it will be interesting to see how training consistently at Caversham over the past couple of months will have influenced their speed.
London Rowing Club (C)
This crew is a pretty exciting combination from London Rowing Club that features two athletes from the very quick club eight that London fielded last year – Calum Jenkins and Sean O’Mahony – as well as University of London Boat Club (UL) alumni Tom Cross and Isaac Workman (Workman has already spent a season in LRC colours). This combination certainly looks good on paper; the Cross/Workman duo won The Prince Albert Challenge Cup together back in 2021 for UL, and both have international representation, with Cross representing GB at the 2021 U23 European Rowing Championships, and Workman winning gold at the 2022 U23 World Rowing Championships in the men’s eight. Jenkins also has international experience – he has raced a couple of times for England at the Home International Regatta, and was the Team and Senior Men’s Captain for the 2024 England squad. While I’m not sure these guys will have the speed to unseat the top boats in this category, their focus will undoubtedly be putting down a strong performance against their Tideway rivals, Thames Rowing Club. The loss in The Thames Challenge Cup to Thames Rowing Club last year will have devastated the London squad – it very much seemed like it might be their year after a dominant performance at Marlow Regatta – and they’ll be coming in all guns blazing to try and right those wrongs. They’re off to a good start – at Pairs Head, O’Mahony’s pair took first in Champ pairs, followed closely by a Workman/Jenkins combination, leaving the Thames pairs in the dust. The result at Fours Head may well be a good indicator of things to come.
Oxford Brookes University Boat Club (E)
This Oxford Brookes University Boat Club (Brookes) entry takes the top athletes from the current squad in Toby Lassen and Marine Arnerich and puts them with two athletes who have just made the step up to the national training centre this season – Fergus Woolnough and Jake Wincomb. These guys, and the program they’re a part of, are eye-wateringly decorated domestically and internationally. Lassen is a true product of the Brookes program, having gone from strength to strength as part of the squad after joining from Great Marlow School. He is a three-time Henley Royal Regatta winner with Brookes – in The Temple Challenge Cup in 2022, The Visitors’ Challenge Cup in 2023, and The Grand Challenge Cup in 2024. He’s also a double U23 World Champion in the men’s eight in 2023 and 2024. Arnerich is a double Henley Royal Regatta winner, in The Prince Albert Challenge Cup in 2023 and The Temple Challenge Cup in 2024 – both alongside his brother, Dominiko.
Woolnough – the big man of the crew – formerly sculled at Hartpury before joining the Brookes squad. His development has been massive while at Brookes, and wins in The Temple Challenge Cup in 2023, The Grand Challenge Cup and The Stewards’ Challenge Cup in 2024 – as well as golds in the men’s eight and the coxless four at the U23 World Rowing Championships – have set him up well as one of GB Rowing’s names to watch. Wincomb is on a similar track; he’s a smaller athlete, but is technically excellent and a formidable racer. He’s a four-time Henley Royal Regatta winner: The Temple Challenge Cup in 2022, The Ladies’ Challenge Plate in 2023, and The Grand Challenge Cup/Stewards’ Challenge Cup combination in 2024. He also has two U23 golds to his name. The amount of success borders on ludicrous in this crew, but it’s a testament to the unbelievably effective Brookes program and its ability to transform athletes and build shockingly fast crews. This is far from peak season for Brookes, and if there was ever a time to beat them, it would likely be here – but with two of these guys doing hard yards at Caversham, and the other two leading the Brookes squad from the front, I’m sure that this crew will be a force to be reckoned with nonetheless.
Thames Rowing Club (C)
This Thames Rowing Club unit have some recognisable faces in the form of intermediate squad members James Beattie, who won the The Thames Challenge Cup in 2021, and Josh Braithwaite, who won the event two years later. As always, Thames have brought in some great new talent for this season as they continue their campaign to dominate the British club scene, though they will undoubtedly be nervous about London Rowing Club this year. A strong performance against their Tideway neighbours here would be welcome for Thames, who fared significantly worse than London at the recent Pairs Head. I can’t help but think that the momentum is with London this year – but Thames always seems to pull it out of the bag when it counts.
Leander Club (M)
Another strong Leander Club entry features multiple Henley-winner Pete Lancashire, who was at Washington before moving to Leander, and Ken Coplan, who is a U23 medallist and was part of the Boat Race-winning Cambridge Blue Boat from 2024. They’re joined by new recruit Thibuad Turlan, who is a French senior international. He stepped onto the French senior national team in 2017, and has both swept and sculled at numerous World Rowing Cup, European and World Rowing Championships. In the pair, he won the B-final at the Tokyo Olympic Games, and was in the French four that looked to be having a strong Olympic season but ultimately faltered in Paris, finishing second in the B-final. His move to Leander is exciting for both parties, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see Turlan competing at the highest level internationally. The lineup is completed by ex-Durham University Boat Club athlete George Reed, who has a U23 European Rowing Championships silver medal to his name, and is looking to continue his development towards Caversham at Leander. I think these guys may well be dark horses here – this boat has a ton of firepower, and the international experience from Turlan is almost unmatched in the field. They’ll certainly have a point to prove against the Brookes entries here, and will likely be looking to beat the Caversham-based Leander entry, too. Watch out for this boat.
Oxford University Boat Club (B)
This Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC) crew is pretty formidable, and they certainly have the athletes to win this event on paper. Anchoring the unit in bow is former OUBC President Tassilo von Mueller, the German international who rowed at Princeton for his undergraduate degree, representing Germany at U23s in the process, before making the move across the pond. He was in the victorious Isis crew for the 2022 season, narrowly missing a seat in one of – if not the – greatest Oxford Blue Boat of all time. He stepped into the Presidency for the 2023 season, and suffered a brutal loss by just over a length to Cambridge in the The Boat Race. He took some time away from the sport last season, but is now back and clearly on great form.
With him are the big three internationals that Oxford have recruited for this campaign: Nic Kohl, Tom Mackintosh and Nick Rusher. Kohl is an ex-Syracuse athlete who stepped onto the Italian senior national team in 2024, making waves by beating the British favourites and winning World Rowing Cup I in the coxless four. His boat then got silver at the European Rowing Championships, and won the Final Olympic and Paralympic Qualification Regatta, earning a spot at the Olympic Games. Ultimately, Nic and the crew were pushed into fourth place in the Olympic final – an impressive result for a crew that came together only in the Olympic year. The other strokesider in the Oxford boat, Rusher, is a Yale-educated American Olympian, who was part of the strong US eight that came home with bronze from Paris.
The four is completed by the new President, Tom Mackintosh. The Kiwi international is probably the single strongest rower in the entire field, with an Olympic gold to his name from the NZ men’s eight in Tokyo. He’s had a long and successful international career, and spent the past couple of years attempting to master the single scull – a quest that earned him World Rowing Cup and World Championship medals and an eventual fifth-place finish at the Olympic Games in a tight field. It’s pretty unheard of for a new recruit to be handed the reigns to the Presidency at Oxbridge for a Boat Race campaign, but if anyone could do it, it seemingly would be Mackintosh. The Dark Blues haven’t had a textbook start to the season – they were beaten by 12 seconds on raw time by Cambridge at the Head of the Charles Regatta last month, with Cambridge University Boat Club taking home the overall win in Championship Eights – but there’s plenty of time yet before The Boat Race, and good performances in events like Fours Head (without the pressure of competition with the Light Blues on this occasion) will buoy the Oxford squad. Certainly, this crew have the pedigree to take home the win here.
Prediction
As you have seen, this is a high-calibre field, and that’s without even mentioning the strong Brookes second four entered here, as well as another quality Thames boat and a decent UL alumni entry from Tyrian Club. That being said, I think the top spot will be a dogfight between Oxford University Boat Club, Leander Club (L), and Oxford Brookes University Boat Club (E). I’m going to go out on a limb and predict Oxford for the win, but I think Brookes will pip Leander for second.
Good luck to all crews.
Five Man
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