2nd July 2023.
Entering the enclosures, in the Prince Albert Cup, the Oxford Brookes University four starts to open their gap on the Washington crew having been down for most the of race. Shooting across the line, arms raised in celebration and relief, this victory would mark just the start of what would go on to be a showing of dominance at Henley unlike anything seen before.
In true Henley finals day style, every race was a brutal battle to the line and yet every time it was the same flash of a yellow Empacher and maroon-clad rowers that would cross the line first.
Seven finals, seven wins, 44 red boxes. It is, therefore, no wonder that everyone will want to ask the same questions: what is the secret sauce? How do they do it? What is it about Henley Royal Regatta and Oxford Brookes?
To be honest, there is no simple answer and can never be one.
You might point to the incredibly tough training, but it’s not as if other programmes don’t push their athletes just as much. One can also point to the use of telemetry and how the club has embraced it in everything it does. Famously, every session is viewed as a seat race and the crews are never set until you are sat on the start line. The use of telemetry, though, is becoming increasingly widespread across clubs both in the UK and internationally and brutal crew selections are not unique to Brookes.
What is often missed is that while from the outside the Oxford Brookes rowing programme can appear as a machine, squeezing out well-drilled and terrifyingly fast crews, it is also a club which relies on every single athlete from the bottom of the squad all the way to the top pushing on each other every day.
It is a club culture which demands the bar to always be raised. The pressure comes from the 120 individual athletes that make up Oxford Brookes University Boat Club all pushing each other in the knowledge that when they are on that Henley start line, wining that race takes the whole boat performing at its very best. It is often discussed that when you line up for that first race at Henley, it could be a line of ducks next to you and you would still for a second doubt yourself, but then you can look up and see the maroon unisuit in front and know that you can take strength from the knowledge that the race is not about who is next to you but knowing that you have the most battle-hardened rowers in the world sat in front and behind you.
Being a Brookes rower at Henley is obviously an enormous privilege, an opportunity to be part of a project to see how high the standard of rowing for a club can be set.
Talking to Martha Birtles about winning the Island Challenge Cup, she was quick to point out that, while an obviously enormous personal achievement, “it wouldn’t have felt anything close to as much without the sea of maroon and navy striped blazers which rallied around and clapped us out and cheered us back in every day. You can see it matters just as much to those who rowed for Brookes 30 years ago and those you trained with every day”.
Maybe then, this is the secret behind Brookes’s speed at Henley. It is a true team effort built up over 40+ years, in which every rower, cox, and coach has played a part in developing and refining the club into a wining machine. While wining for yourself is great, wining for your crew, your club, and your friends matters so much more and when the race comes down to inches, this is what can make the difference.
While for now Brookes sits at the top, it is for other clubs to keep stepping up because there is no magic bullet to wining. Currently, Brookes appears to have found all the right ingredients to win, but we have seen dynasties rise and fall in rowing and what the perfect recipe for success is today may not be the best one in the future.
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