George Bourne thought he was going to the Olympic Games in 2024. Instead, he ended up at the University of Cambridge. Barely a year later, he was on top of the world.
In what has been a superlative 2025, weeks after graduating from one of the best universities on the planet, Bourne had a World Championship gold around his neck. His annual haul was already astonishing: a Boat Race trouncing by 5 1⁄2 lengths, Blades in May bumps, solo glory at Wingfield Skulls, and a clean sweep in GB’s long distance trials.
Despite the sheen of recent success, the 27-year-old’s row to glory has often gone against the tide. He didn’t even pick up the oars until his final year of school, and had never raced in a Coxless Four until the heats of a World Championship he went on to win. And so while Cambridge’s academic pressure cooker may not seem like the obvious place to rejuvenate a rowing career, for Bourne it proved to be exactly that.
“The people who run the Boat Race are worried that people come to Cambridge as a full-time rower to have a doss year, scrape their way into the seat and have a bit of fun.” For Bourne, the reality couldn’t have been a starker contrast: “I couldn’t have imagined that my rowing would go from where it did to where it was by the end.” Ever-candid, Bourne admits: “The last year of my time at GB Rowing had been pretty tough. It was quite a big shock honestly, from February 2024 thinking I was a couple of months away from official Olympic selection, all your kit days, and suddenly it was like – you’re out of the team. I needed a lift […] and Cambridge did that for me.”
“Culture is crucial too, and certain aspects of Oxford’s ‘just don’t really fly at Cambridge’”
The glittering run Bourne has been on since started off as a “half joke,” a throwaway text that materialised into a cabinet of victories. Having forged his already late-coming career in sculling, Bourne switched to sweep rowing at Cambridge – trading two oars for one, and swapping the pressure of professionalism for a change of discipline that meant “no one expects anything.” At the very outset, Bourne pinged off an “outlandish” message to a former coach, saying: “I guess my goal would be winning [the GB trials] in a single boat, and then win both in the pair, and then win the Boat Race and then win the World Champs. Wouldn’t that be funny?” When he stormed to the world title this September, every part of Bourne’s pipe dream had become a triumphant reality, and his old coach replied with a surreal “Remember when you sent this?”
While Bourne’s success story may have seemed scarcely believable, there has been a splash of sparkledust in the Cam in recent years. Cambridge’s nonpareil coach and culture come up time and time again in our conversation, twin facets that have made brilliance the norm, both for Bourne and light blue rowing more broadly. It’s no coincidence that three of Bourne’s World Championship-winning Coxless Four had gone to Cambridge. Many might see Cambridge as privileged to have the likes of Bourne in its armoury, to Bourne “the privilege was ours.”
“The culture at the Boat Club (CBC), I’d heard all about it and you think it’s just a myth.” The truth? “It emanates throughout the club […] it was just epic.” There is not a hint of hyperbole in Bourne’s voice when he crowns Rob Baker, who heads up the men’s programme, as “maybe the best coach in the world”.
Since 2018, the Championship Course has run light blue in every men’s Boat Race bar one. Bow-seat Simon Baker was “seriously unwell” the night before this year’s showpiece, but Bourne and co still went on to post the seventh fastest time in history. Even though “Oxford have won the recruitment battle in recent years,” something – and someone – is clearly giving Cambridge the cutting edge. To Bourne, the winning ingredients are no secret: “2019 was probably the last time you would’ve said Cambridge would’ve been the favourite because of all the new intake. This year, Oxford had three Olympians and we technically had none coming in. It’s about what Rob Baker manages to do with either underdogs or equally matched crews to take them so far up and above.”
Culture is crucial too, and certain aspects of Oxford’s “just don’t really fly at Cambridge”. Bourne reveals: “I don’t mean to slander Oxford in this, but they got some great rowers in, and they didn’t really feature in any rowing tests, Erg tests, or for different reasons they weren’t there for Trial Eights […] At Cambridge you turn up not because anyone’s told you to, you don’t really see anyone think they’re bigger than the club or better than anyone else.”
“And Rob says to him - ‘Listen. We’re going to win the Boat Race. It’ll be easier if we have you and harder if we don’t!’”
In what is “such an amateur sport,” there is nothing quite like the “completely unique” Boat Race. For Bourne, glory felt “like our Andy Murray winning Wimbledon moment, because rowing’s not big, but this was the moment that everyone was interested in.” At the light blues’ last training row, hours after Simon Baker was “sick in the sink as we were meant to be leaving,” the atmosphere was already unrivalled. “We ended up driving our minibus through hundreds of Cambridge alumni banging on the windows as we’re going through. Everyone’s cheers. Everyone’s hyped,” Bourne regales. “That doesn’t happen at the World Champs. We go for our final training row there, we have a chat amongst ourselves, we lounge in our hotel for a bit. Even at the medal ceremony you look up and it’s like – there’s my mum, there’s my dad – and the rest of the stadium is basically empty.”
Oxford and Cambridge’s annual tussle on the Thames is presaged by another competition far from the water – to recruit the finest rowers they can. From the outside, it’s a process shrouded in backroom mystery. But Bourne knows the inside track: “It’s not so much that the universities reach out to individuals at random. People have enough links, and it will feed back to a coach that ‘so and so has expressed an interest’ and the coach will reach out, or (a coach) will meet someone through rowing and they’ll have a conversation […] it happens quite organically.” Having plied his trade on the Cam as a nineteen-year-old novice, Bourne admits: “with the Cambridge connection, I ended up only applying here”.
For those torn in between the two academic powerhouses, however, it’s a spicier situation. The Judge Business School graduate reveals: “For someone who applied to both, you’re having conversations with the two and the recruitment there becomes a bit funny. The thing I love most is this story about Rob Baker where he was talking to one guy who he knows is in conversation [with Oxford] and Rob says to him – ‘Listen. We’re going to win the Boat Race. It’ll be easier if we have you and harder if we don’t. But ultimately, the decision is yours! ’”
“I hope they don’t change Bumps rules just because good rowers end up in one college”
Last year, Bourne formed part of an embarrassment of rowing riches at Peterhouse College. In May Bumps, the college’s Men’s firsts were branded ‘the Blue boat’, boasting an Olympic gold-medallist in the stroke seat and five other Blues for good measure. Was it a coincidental coalescence of talent, or is there something particularly alluring about Peterhouse? “The first two to go there were my friends Tom George and Ollie Wynne-Griffith and they loved it. Being in the business school, it’s super close to that as well. So the three of us who came from the (GB) team – Tom Ford, James Robson, and myself – who are friends with Tom (George) and Ollie (Wynne Griffiths) all ended up in Peterhouse,” Bourne discloses.
“I know they enjoying having rowers at Peterhouse, and when you’re a postgrad it’s not that Peterhouse can offer you a space at the University, because it’s not the same as an undergrad where you get a place at the college. When you then apply to your college, Peterhouse are very welcoming. It’s a bit like recruitment for the University (Boat Club), when you’ve got people who know other people and they’re asking where should we go, and someone goes ‘Peterhouse is great’ it’s sort of like – oh we’ll all go to Peterhouse as well.”
As Bourne frankly concedes, Peterhouse’s peerless arsenal of rowers did “end up being a bit controversial in May Bumps.” Quick to empathise, the World Champion appreciates that “there were a lot of (college) clubs who thought, oh, this isn’t great. I think these things come and go in waves, and I hope they don’t change Bumps rules just because good rowers end up in one college. I hope that there’s a way that can be found that it’s not offensive to people, and maybe people could sit there and be like ‘oh, we just got bumped by Tom Ford, the Olympic champion’. But I can I can see it from both sides.”
In 2024, Bourne’s rowing days could have been dead in the water. “I think if I’d gone to the (Paris) Olympics, I would have retired there because I wasn’t really enjoying myself in the team and hadn’t been for a couple of years,” he confesses. Fast forward to 2025, and the Cambridge graduate now has a Los Angeles-shaped flame burning inside him: “Having won gold this year (at the World Championships), suddenly I find myself thinking ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to win the Olympics in LA? ’. Whereas after missing out on Paris, I was sat there like ‘if I make the Olympics, it’ll be the best feeling ever’. It’s funny how you then get one result and think – what if we could win the whole thing?”
