‘Waves were coming over my head, it
Myriam Goudet says she is intent on victory after hurt of last year’s near sinking for Cambridge
The technical term for it is “swamping”. Though Myriam Goudet would choose other words to describe what happened to the Cambridge team in last year’s women’s Boat Race. Terms such as dispiriting, depressing, devastating. Goudet was in the Cambridge boat that came as close to sinking as any in a university boat race since 1978. And images of the moment are engraved on her memory.
“The trouble started just after Hammersmith Bridge,” she remembers as she sits in the Thames Rowing Club at Putney on a glorious afternoon when the river behind her looks about as threatening as a half-filled bath. “We started to hit some rough water. We stayed in the middle of the stream and just past the Eyot we literally hit this wall of waves. I remember having waves coming over my head, it was that bad.”
A soaking, though, was the least of her worries. Temporarily overwhelmed, the boat’s automatic pumps could not keep the water out. Cambridge were going down. “As the boat got heavier, the rhythm was really hard to maintain,” she says. “It’s like a terrible, vicious circle: when you start to take on water, it pushes you down into the river, so it’s easier for water to come over the sides. For a couple of minutes, I thought that was it.”
What made their predicament all the more dispiriting was that the capricious conditions seemed to burden them alone. Their opponents, already several lengths ahead by this point, were in no way inconvenienced. “The thing is, we stayed in the middle, while Oxford decided to go to the bank. The waves were less there. And they were OK.” It was a decision that cost Goudet a chance to make history. She was the first Frenchwoman to row in the Boat Race and she was hoping to become the first to win it. But she is not one to apportion blame.
“Everyone says the stream is always stronger than the headwind, so it’s better to stay in the middle,” she says of Tideway lore. “This time though, it wasn’t like that. Because this was tide against headwind, we suddenly had waves. Really, really big waves. Rosemary [Ostfeld, the Cambridge cox] chose the normal navigation. We cannot blame her at all. Oxford tried something different and it worked for them. It’s the nature of the Boat Race. The conditions present a challenge. One boat tries something, it works, the other sticks with the normal plan and it doesn’t.”
Once the pumps sparked back into action, the boat lifted sufficiently for the crew to refind their rhythm. But by then the race was over, and they paddled home, defeated as much by the conditions as their opponents. “My biggest frustration was to cross the finish line not feeling tired,” she says.