The bitter row to engulf this year’s Boat Race could stop three more Cambridge rowers – including reigning Olympic champion Tom Ford – from taking part.
Ford and the Cambridge women’s team’s 2025 and 2024 presidents, Dr Lucy Havard and Jenna Armstrong, face joining three trainee teachers who have been blocked from entering next month’s showdown on the Thames.
What was branded “a desperate ploy from Oxford to gain an upper hand in the most slimy way” by Olympic champion Imogen Grant follows their defeats in five of the past six men’s races and all of the last seven women’s races.
Telegraph Sport has been told that Ford, who stroked Great Britain to Paris 2024 gold last summer before starting a Masters of Business Administration course at Cambridge, is at the centre of an increasingly acrimonious dispute between Britain’s two oldest universities.
It follows a crackdown on elite-level “ringers” entering the Boat Race in the wake of double-Olympic champion James Cracknell becoming its oldest winner, at 46, in 2019, 13 years after his competitive retirement.
The rules of the race, the so-called “Joint Agreement” between Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC) and Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC), were changed in 2021 with the intention of preventing anyone competing more than 12 years after beginning an undergraduate degree course.
Ford, who began a BA in Geography and Town Planning at Newcastle University almost 14 years ago, is not currently listed on the CUBC men’s squad on the Boat Race’s official website. But, on March 2, the 32-year-old stroked their “provisional Blue Boat” (their Boat Race crew) to victory against Olympic silver medallists the Netherlands in two “preparation” races for next month’s event.
Havard – who started a PhD in history at Cambridge in 2022 and is listed among the CUBC’s women’s squad – embarked upon a medical degree at University College London in 2007. Meanwhile, United States-born Armstrong – who is studying for a postgraduate degree in physiology – is known to have taken up rowing in 2011 while an undergraduate.
To add intrigue to the current row, Havard and Armstrong both competed for Cambridge last year, in the reserve and main races, respectively, despite it having been more than 12 years since they began their undergraduate degrees. Telegraph Sport has also been told that there had previously been the prospect of Ford ending up enrolling at Oxford instead of Cambridge.
The 12-year rule was agreed by both boat clubs but sources have suggested Cambridge have secured a legal opinion that it could be deemed “discriminatory”, with one questioning whether Oxford would have sought to do the same had Ford been a student there.
All this is said to have led to Oxford successfully challenging the eligibility of three Cambridge Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) students – former men’s Under-23 world champion Matt Heywood, and women’s squad members Molly Foxell and cox Kate Crowley. That is despite PGCE students having long competed for both Oxford and Cambridge unchallenged under rules governing the race.
Sources have suggested Havard, Armstrong, Foxell and Crowley had become collateral damage in a dispute about Ford and, to a lesser extent, Heywood, amid a years-long debate about whether the Boat Race should be an “elite” event or a competition between young amateurs.
“This debate didn’t start with James Cracknell,” one former Cambridge competitor told Telegraph Sport, pointing out that Oxford’s men’s winning boat in 2013 and 2014 had included Canada’s Beijing 2008 champion Malcolm Howard.
“It’s really the men’s clubs driving it by saying, ‘This degree course is bogus’, or, ‘You’ve funded this person’.
“Particularly on the women’s side, there has been a dialogue. The toxicity of where the men’s club is coming from has blasted any of that away.
“It’s like, ‘Let’s win by stopping you being able to row’. That’s not good, is it? If you win this race and you stop people rowing, is that going to feel good?”
Both boat clubs and the Boat Race Company have been approached for comment.
