Tabs take first cross-channel championship
The St Hughs/St Annes team row away from the White Cliffs of Dover
Rowing The Cambridge Channel Challenge
After four hours at sea, the combined forces of St Hugh’s and St Anne’s coastal rowing club landed on a touristridden beach near the French port of Calais. Blown off course by a mixture of an abrasive sea pilot and a snapped seat ten miles off Dover, the five sat on the French soil, technically illegal immingrants.
Tom Inglis, Miles Jackson, Tom Hamilton, Ed Goodfellow, and cox Emily Uecker ended the epic channel row in heroic style, with a 10km sprint finish against the might of a seasoned Sidney Sussex crew from Cambridge. The Oxford team’s strong finish earned them a well deserved third place out of six teams, including four crews from archrivals Cambridge, with St John's coming in first. The intensely demanding race was the brainchild of Lennard Lee from St.
John’s, Cambridge, to raise money for Cancer Research UK. His challenge was boldly accepted by the Hugh’s/Anne’s team and a women’s crew from Oxford’s Regent’s Park and Lady Margaret Hall. Previously only 20 successful attempts had ever been made to row the Channel, and none of these were in race conditions, making the Cambridge Channel Challenge truly unique as one of the first genuine tests of the physical and mental endurance demanded by long distance rowing.
Finding the team to take on the world’s busiest shipping lane was not easy given a packed schedule of summer eights and finals, but nonetheless five high performance athletes were found to make the St. Hugh’s/St. Anne’s dedicated crew. Training for the event required a combination of intense steady state cardiovascular exercise, such as erging, running, cycling and swimming, as well as core stability exercises and weight training.
The team split their training between the Thames at Oxford, with technical coach Morven Porteous, and Eastbourne Rowing Club, where they faced the previously unencountered dif- ficulties of rowing at sea. “Racing on the sea is immensely challenging, not only because of the distance involved but also because of the unpredictability of the wind and waves,” said Tom Inglis of St Hughs.
“It’s difficult to take as consistently good strokes as you aim for on the river, and you’re constantly battling to bail water out of the boat.” The boat was also laden with five litres of isotonic water per crew member merely to keep them sufficiently hydrated. Maltloaf, in all of its regenerative glory, helped the crew to recover their strength.
The challenge demanded its own special equipment to mitigate for the dangers of rowing on open water, with the coastal four boat designed specially to be wider, deeper and more buoyant than the standard four used in traditional Oxford river races. Commenting on the race as a whole, Inglis described the half-way point in the race as the hardest element of the course.
“We were taking on a lot of water but Emily’s calls, my faith in the three guys rowing behind, and the determination to finish drove me on.” This was a triumphant result for the Oxford team, who had no previous experience in such a competition. When asked whether he would do it again, Miles Jackson of St Anne’s quipped, “what’s a 21 mile race between friends?” For the St Hugh’s/St Anne’s rowers it was about far more than the glory of the race.
Goodfellow’s mantra of ‘I love the training’ became the team motto through hard sessions, such as their much publicised 21 mile erg. All their hard work succeeded in raising money and awarenes for Cancer Research UK, the crew’s charity of choice, and it was in this that the crew had their biggest and most satisfying success of all.
5th Oct 2005