While most of the Boat Race coverage discussed polluted water and the heroics of a collapsing student, another beautiful story unfolded on the murky waters of the Thames – a narrative that commentators are not used to describing and cameras cannot zoom in on. It might at first sound an absurd paradox, a sporting oxymoron, a human impossibility: the notion and reality of a caring high-performance culture. But I’ve seen up close how the Cambridge women’s team have been investing in it and, though it can never only be measured and justified in race outcomes, it certainly paid off on Saturday.
Culture can seem vague, difficult to control and slow to develop. Yet it remains a huge performance factor that many teams are only at the beginning of working out how to optimise. It’s so tempting to set goals to increase watts per stroke, weights lifted in the gym and rowing machine scores. But this season the Cambridge women’s chief coach, Paddy Ryan, set a goal to have “care as a guiding principle of everything we do” and embarked on exploring what a caring culture could mean for the students, coaches and support staff.
