Sitting down on a rainy Monday afternoon outside a central Oxford cafe, Annie Anezakis brought the essence of the Melbourne sunshine to our conversation. It is clear from talking to the 26-year-old Australian that she is unwaveringly passionate about her sport and truly bleeds Dark Blue – fitting given that she sits opposite me in a full navy outfit and currently holds the title of Oxford University Boat Club’s Women’s President. In her second year of Graduate Entry Medicine at Pembroke College, Oxford, I caught up with her about her rowing and academic background and her thoughts on the upcoming 2025 Boat Race.
Annie Anezakis grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she attended St Catherine’s School. Known for its rowing prowess, namely as winners of the inaugural Prince Phillip Challenge Trophy for schoolgirl eights in 2022, rowing is a part of the fabric of the school. Back in 2012, it was PE lessons which first drew Annie to step foot in a boat on the River Yarra.
“I started out sculling in a coxed quad, and was very uncoordinated but had somehow a great erg,” she said. “I stuck with the technique and rowed for four years with St Catherine’s. We moved into eights for our final two years of high school, and my eight actually won at Nationals [Australian Rowing Championships].”
Anezakis speaks very fondly of her school and associated boat club, remarking her pride at the 2022 Prince Phillip win, especially after having spent time with the crew at the Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC) base, Wallingford, the week prior to Henley Royal Regatta. It was her schoolgirl eight at St Catherine’s, which she stroked to their Australian Championships win in 2016, that really catapulted Anezakis into the rowing sphere and made her start to consider her post-school choices.
The dark blue explained: “All of a sudden, I started getting all these recruitment letters through the mail from Harvard, Yale, Princeton – it was all very foreign to me and something that I’d never considered doing. I was quite academic at that age and going to an Ivy League school always seemed like an amazing idea, but it suddenly became a possibility through rowing. I ended up filling out the recruitment form to be a lightweight at Princeton, as most of the heavyweight programs had already told me I was too short.”
After being offered an official visit to Princeton during her final exams, Annie knew that this was way too good of an opportunity to pass up on. Despite never having considered studying overseas before, the lure of the rowing facilities and academic opportunities drew her out to New Jersey to join the team. With moving halfway across the world comes some major shifts in life, especially for an overseas athlete moving onto the US college rowing scene.
Racing as a Princeton lightweight took Anezakis to wins at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRAs), Head of the Charles, as well as one-on-one races with clubs including Georgetown, Harvard Radcliffe, and Stanford.
“The college culture is very competitive and it really does span the entire country,” she said. “But you come up against the same crews again and again throughout the season. The IRAs are also raced by the heavyweight men, but the lightweight women’s league was only eight boats total, so it was really competitive. Even within the squad, our lightweight eight was always competitive with the Princeton 2V at least, if not the 1V, fairly consistently. We’d also race other openweight university crews in New Jersey and certainly be at the sharp end of the competition.”
Following her major in Molecular Biology, Annie came to Oxford to pursue an MSc in Pharmacology. However, Oxford hadn’t been the only option on the table and she may well have ended up in light blue had the pandemic not rolled around. Alongside Oxford, Anezakis had also been in talks with a fellow Australian at Cambridge about going to pursue her masters there, but when she ended up spending Christmas of her senior year in Oxford, she quickly fell in love with the city.
She said: “I couldn’t go back to Australia but I came here, saw Oxford and I think I fell in love. I got in contact with the [OUBC] coaches and they encouraged me to apply, smething I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence to do otherwise. I was pretty much done with the US by then, but the idea of Oxford was something I’d thought about but never believed would happen.”
After the 2022 Boat Race, she jokes that, despite only being 23 years old at the time, she and many of the other girls in the Blue Boat, including Erin Reelick and Anja Zehfuss, announced that they were ‘retiring’, hanging up their oars and embarking on a life where rowing was not such a big part. After moving back home to Australia and returning to St Catherine’s as a coach while she applied to medical schools, Anezakis spent a year out of the boat and relatively disconnected from the world of senior rowing. After putting in applications to medical schools in Australia, as well as Oxford, the offer she received was to return to the dark blue side and come back to the UK.
“Medicine was always the plan, but rowing has taken me on the longest road possible, and with all these added amazing life experiences and opportunities,” she said. “When I came back to Oxford, I wasn’t planning on rowing again, but caved very quickly and returned to the squad, and here we are!”
Now in her second year as a graduate medic and currently juggling her presidency with training and being on placement in the Ambulatory Assessment Unit in Oxford, Annie speaks confidently of how much there is to gain before Boat Race Day in April.
She explained: “The mood in the camp is great, but this is always a tough time of year. The weather’s bad, we’re on and off with flooding, but we had a good first training fixture with Molesey. They won every piece, but with the provisional Blue Boat, it was between a quarter to a full length – pretty close pieces as a starting point. We come up against Brookes next, so right now it’s heads down, training hard and seeing how much we can build the engine before we face them.
“We built up some really positive momentum last year with Osiris winning. The Blue Boat race didn’t go quite as planned, but we gained a lot from last season, and my biggest thing coming in as president was that we couldn’t lose any of the momentum we had from the previous season. We had to keep that going. The culture was built last year, and now we’re squeezing out those percentage points to get the most out of our athletes on race day.”
It’s now been nine years since Oxford’s Blue Boat lifted the trophy, but the shakeup of this now being Allan French’s first full season with the squad, as well as some stellar recruits, going into the race as underdogs is not necessarily a bad thing.
“The post-Olympic year is always very different, and the recruits [including Heidi Long, Kyra Delray, and Sarah Polson – with whom Annie raced at Princeton] bring so much to the team, especially with all their experience. Allan was only full-time from January last year, whereas now he’s put in a lot of work over the summer and came in all guns blazing from September to really make his mark. We’ve had a further change in the coaching structure this year, with many more assistant coaches, which has really helped to build everyone’s confidence even with a losing streak.
“I think I have a really deep connection to the club, and that’s what’s such a huge driver for me. I know a lot of the women who have come before, and many of my close friends have been made through this boat club. I’m doing this for them, as well as the athletes around me every day.”
Despite the obviously disappointing track record of recent years, this is an exciting time for Oxford University Boat Club. Having settled into their merged ‘one club’ philosophy and with a new outfit of coaching staff, it really is a breath of fresh air to hear of the positive outlook within the club. The bookies are already placing their money on Cambridge to win both the men’s and women’s Boat Races, but I’m truly excited to see what the crews in dark blue can do on the day, especially under the stellar leadership of Annie Anezakis and Tom Mackintosh.
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