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.
The race on Saturday demonstrated that a caring environment does not damage performance. Nobody watching the women’s Boat Race could describe the Cambridge crew as “soft”, unable to dig in when it mattered or weak under pressure – quite the opposite. Psychological safety is a term used across sport and business with research emphasising its connection to team performance. Yet many leaders and sports coaches hold on to a deeply ingrained belief that performance environments must be difficult, even miserable, and that challenge is beneficial with less support, rather than more.
Under Ryan, the Cambridge women have freed themselves from these outdated constraints. The students described to me how their coaches encouraged them to make mistakes and take risks without fear of recrimination. Failure would only be not trying out something new on the water or in the gym.
In a world of never-ending sports integrity scandals and culture reviews, it’s crucial to highlight where progressive performance environments are being created. Once we realise the caring culture did not detract from the Cambridge women’s performance, we can start to learn about how it actually enhanced their powerful display.
Relationships across the squad were carefully nurtured. These are women who have intentionally looked after each other despite the pressure they are under as a squad to compete for places.
Selection is explicitly portrayed by the coaches and the leading senior athletes as based on rivalry in the sense not of lessening others but pushing forward with one another. They bring to life the essence of research from the organisational psychologist Adam Grant that giving to others around us, rather than taking from or competing against, can affect our success positively.
I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the current Cambridge women’s squad – a humble group, eager to learn, committed to supporting each other. I knew they were highly capable but I also knew they were relatively inexperienced and would encounter huge pressure in this unique student sporting event watched around the world. Having wrestled for years within a culture of “who’s the toughest” to develop my own belief that I could deliver my best performance at world championships or Olympics, I worried about where they would find the confidence and courage to go out as underdogs, overturn the form book and show what they were capable of. I need not have worried. The environment of care crafted carefully on Ryan’s watch had been nurturing confidence and courage every day. Not a loud, back-slapping, macho sort of confidence, but a beautiful, internal and resilient confidence.
I’ve experienced various pre-race talks over the years from coaches: some heroic speeches psyching us up for the pain to come in the face of the devastating lactic acid and oxygen deficit that races bring. Others talked obsessively about a winning mentality, emphasising that only coming first mattered. But none of that featured in Ryan’s team talk on Saturday. They respected their Oxford opponents and Ryan openly admitted it was likely that they could be down in the first part of the race. They had to play to their strengths. So refreshingly realistic yet so far from the Hollywoodesque scripts we might expect or classic coach talks I’ve heard over the years to “make sure you get in front and stay there”. As their impressively grounded president Jenna Armstrong explained later, regardless of whether ahead or behind, they were committed to give their own best ever performance “for the woman in front and the woman behind”.
The BBC commentator and Olympian Zoe de Toledo described Ryan as a “feminist” coach. He talks openly of wanting to learn how to create an environment for female student athletes to thrive in. Constantly aware of how much there is that we still don’t know about women’s physiology and health in a world where a tiny percentage of sports science has ever involved women, Ryan remains determined to find out more about what women in sport need to flourish physiologically, emotionally and culturally.
In the run-up to the Olympics, I hope our pundits and commentators, and ourselves as spectators, can put aside the old macho tropes, win-lose cliches and simplistic medal-table perspectives, and notice these inspirational moments where new approaches to sport offer us a deeper understanding of how to unlock human potential, performance and possibility.
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