Was that bad’
“We hadn’t been able to execute fully our plan. And when you spend so much time through the winter building up for this, that was toughest thing to take. When you lose and you know you gave everything, it’s fine. But when you can’t give everything, that hurts.”
She remembers the hurt lingering long after she had dried out. Everywhere on social media she kept encountering images of the moment she and her colleagues hit the wall of water. “Oh yeah, I watched it,” says the 28-year-old, who is doing a PhD in Plant Science at Lucy Cavendish College. “I couldn’t escape it. A week after the race, people were putting videos of us under water on my Facebook wall. It was hard at the beginning to watch again. I don’t think I’ve ever been as miserable as I was in the few days after.”
Mind, in one sense she was lucky. Her team-mate, the Canadian rower Ashton Brown, was sitting in the bow seat and took the full force of the wave. She contracted pneumonia as a result of her soaking. You might imagine after what happened last year neither of them would want to go anywhere near a boat again. And yet, in a testament to the competition’s enduring pull, both women are back this year.
“I love rowing,” is Goudet’s concise explanation. And she adds that she and Brown, the two survivors of the dice with the depths, have been charged by an additional spark of motivation.
“When you lose once, you want to win second time. It doesn’t matter how we lost last year, we just lost. Now we want to win.”
If she does tomorrow, history is still open to her, albeit delayed by the intervention of water. “Yes, I could be the first Frenchwoman to win the Boat Race. It’s not something I’m thinking about. If it happens, great. What I want more than that is to show properly what I can do, what this team can do. That’s really what I hope.”
They could only be brothers: the way they laugh, the way they joust, the way they finish each other’s sentences. Ollie is the more imposing of the two: taller, heavier, blonder, with a deeper voice and a deeper set. Typical older brother.
Jamie, meanwhile, does most of the joshing and most of the talking. Typical younger brother.
The Cancer Research UK Boat Race is one of the toughest races in British sport. Eighteen minutes of unstinting exertion. Eighteen minutes of pure pain. So it helps to have a familiar face along for the ride.
Jamie Cook will not see his older brother four seats behind him in the Oxford boat, but he will hear him, sense him, take comfort from him. When you have blood on your side, the sweat and the tears take care of themselves.
Ollie, 26, is the one with the international pedigree, having won World Championship gold last year and come within a hair’s breadth of earning selection for the Rio Olympics. Jamie, 24, is the one with the race pedigree, having rowed for Oxford in the 2015 and 2016 crews. Yet when they take their places on the start line tomorrow afternoon, they will know that neither would have made it there without the other.
Like all brothers, there is a healthy rivalry there. As Jamie puts it: “Ollie has always done things. And I’ve always said, ‘Yeah, I can do it better than that’. I’m always the underdog, the younger brother.”
“I know that Jamie’s always