2025 Boat Race features 3 Cambridge MBA rowers

Main image credit: Nordin Catic.

This year’s annual Boat Race between Cambridge and Oxford universities features 3 rowers who are current Cambridge MBA students at Cambridge Judge Business School. The men’s and women’s races on the River Thames in London are held on 13 April. 

The Cambridge University Boat Club chose for the Women’s Boat Race squad the Cambridge MBA student Claire Collins (MBA 2024), a US national who competed in the last 2 Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021 and Paris in 2024.  

Claire rowed alongside another Cambridge MBA alumna from the US, Olivia Coffey (MBA 2017), in the Women’s Eight at the Paris Olympic Games 2024, coming in 5th position overall. Olivia competed for the winning Cambridge Women’s Boat Race team in 2018.

Rower photo credits: Row360 Benedict Tufnell.

Chosen by the Cambridge University Boat Club for this year’s 170th Men’s Boat Race are Cambridge MBA students George Bourne (MBA 2024) and James Robson (MBA 2024), who are both from the UK. 

George won the Under 23 World Championships in 2019 and secured a silver medal at the 2022 World Rowing Championships. James, a recipient of the Cambridge MBA Scholarship for Professional Impact, was selected as a Team GB Reserve for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

All 3 Cambridge MBA rowers in the 2025 Boat Race are members of Peterhouse, Cambridge, the oldest of 31 Colleges of the University of Cambridge.  

Elite rowers separate success essentials from distractions 

The Boat Race is televised in the UK by the BBC, and a film crew for the BBC spent several hours at Cambridge Judge in March. Along with interviews, the crew filmed a class led by Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography, who was embedded for nearly 200 days with the men’s Boat Race crew in 2007 for research on high-performing teams.

As part of his teaching on such elite teams, Mark refers to the ‘Stephens Question’ named after former Cambridge University Boat Club President Roger Stephens. The Stephens Question, which is designed to separate essentials to success from diversions, asks simply: “Will doing X help us win the Boat Race?” If so, the something is done, and if not, it is discarded. The Men’s Eight who won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 transformed this question into a version popularly used today: “Will doing X help make the boat go faster?” 

In a Financial Times article last week, Mark talked about the discipline of elite student rowers: “They are people who would be unhappy with anything that’s not as perfect as they can make it, in any aspect of their life. That’s why rowers are great students. They turn up to class before anyone else.” 

There was controversy ahead of this year’s Boat Race, with a number of athletes being unable to take part in the selection process due to a rule precluding any rower who began an undergraduate course more than 12 years earlier. One such student is Olympic gold medallist and current Cambridge MBA student Tom Ford (MBA 2024), also a Peterhouse member.

On 13 April 2025, Cambridge won the women’s race for the eighth year in a row following a restart when oars clashed, while the Cambridge men’s team won for the third consecutive year.