Regatta chairman lives up to past and embraces future

IT was almost inevitable that Richard Phelps would become the chairman of Henley Royal Regatta.

His family has been associated with rowing on the River Thames for more than 400 years.

Mr Phelps, 59, has been involved with the royal regatta for 40 years as a competitor, umpire and steward but he admits to still pinching himself after securing the top job.

He succeeds Sir Steve Redgrave, who stepped down after 10 years following the 185th regatta and is excited for his first to begin on July 1.

Mr Phelps, who will serve a term of six years, said: “Clearly, there was a point at which it became clear that there was going to be a new chair after Steve and I put myself up for consideration and the committee of management chose me.

“Quite frankly, as a Phelps, I was still getting over the news that I was a steward on the committee, let alone the news that I was going to chair the committee of the stewards.

“There’s a point in time where I said, ‘Yes, I want to be it’ but I pinch myself almost every morning and say, ‘Am I really the chair of Henley Royal Regatta?’

“But for me, the love of rowing has always been something which has always been by osmosis rather than an ‘Aha’ moment.”

The Phelps family had earned its livelihood on the River Thames since the 15th century, initially carrying passengers across the water as apprenticed watermen and lightermen and later building racing boats for use in international events. It was “Honest John” Phelps who declared the 1877 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race a dead heat.

Mr Phelps’s grandfather, Dick, was an acclaimed rower, boatbuilder and boatman and was one of 10 relatives to win the Doggett’s Coat and Badge, a 7.5km race along the Thames in central London, while others held professional world, European and British sculling titles.

They include Ted and Eric Phelps, the sons of celebrated rowing coach John “Bossie” Phelps, who won numerous events in the Twenties and Thirties.

Brothers Dick, Bill, Jack and Tom Phelps worked in the Henley boat tents helping the clubs during the royal regatta sometime in the Thirties.

But, as working men who worked with their hands, they were not allowed to compete. Dick, even though he was a boatman, wasn’t allowed in the stewards’ enclosure.

Mr Phelps was born in London on November 21, 1965, to Michael and Clare Phelps.

His first outing on the Thames was in Putney with his grandfather at the age of six but it wasn’t until he went to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith that he caught the rowing bug.

Mr Phelps said: “My family have rowed for hundreds of years and were working rowers on the River Thames and then boat builders so it was just kind of assumed that I would do it too.

“My grandfather first put me out on a rowing boat at the age of six. I didn’t then get back into a boat until I was 14. My grandfather came to Henley every year but he wasn’t allowed to race or go into the enclosure because he was a working man and a professional so the fact that 90 years later his grandson is chair tells you the journey that society and our sport of rowing and Henley have made.

“The fact that the grandson of someone who wasn’t allowed to do those things and had to call all the rowers ‘sir’ and were all men is now the chair shows you how much Henley has evolved. I feel very privileged.”

Mr Phelps began rowing as a cox until he was 15 when he had a growth spurt. He is now 6ft 5in tall.

He first raced at Henley in 1983 for Latymer Upper School when he was 17 in the Special Schools Cup and left school that year. He then worked for seven years to fund his rowing, made the Great Britain squad and won the Grand Challenge Cup in 1991.

The crew received a bye before beating the Dinamo and Soviet Army composite crew in the final by two-and-a-half lengths.

The following year, at the age of 26, he competed in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona in the men’s coxed eights, finishing sixth.

He then went to Cambridge University to study land economy and it was here he rediscovered his love for rowing.

Mr Phelps went straight into the Blues team and competed and won the Boat Race three times from 1993.

He recalled: “The boat race was a completely different experience, especially compared to the Olympics. The coaching was sensational. It was
game-changing. There were one or two of us who had competed at that level but everyone else had not. The quality of athletes was less good than the Olympic team but the quality of the coaching, the programme, the focus, was sky high.

“In 1992 in particular, when crew selection was done so late, to be part of a system that was so systematic and logical and thoughtful and the coaching was very constructive, it was great to rediscover my love for rowing after what happened in Barcelona.

“We were underdogs by a long way. Oxford had a very strong crew, with two Olympic gold medallists and I think four Olympians on board. They were a much stronger crew but we knew we were really moving our boat well.

“I grew up in West London so the Boat Race was something I’d watched since I was four or five years old so walking out to take part in the Boat Race felt a bit surreal.

“Like all Boat Race rowers who do it for the first time, you get told about the crew, the noise, the helicopter and everything. But nothing prepares you for rowing under Putney Bridge for the umpteenth time.

“But this time, you discover there are 1,000 people cheering you on, the noise of the helicopter above and the roar when the umpire says go.

“There are bits of it where, no matter how often you’re told, you just don’t believe until it actually happens. The race in 1993 was a happy memory because we got the lead within about three minutes and that was it. We had 14 minutes to stay in front and thankfully, we did.” Mr Phelps, who lives in Chiswick with his Olympic rower wife, Annamarie, have three children Thomas, 27, James, 25, and Cissie, 23, all of whom have rowed.

He retired from rowing in 1995 and was made a steward of the royal regatta in 1997 and in 2002 joined the management committee. He has also umpired the men’s Boat Race in 2014 and 2019 and the women’s Boat Race last year.

Mr Phelps said his aim as chairman of the regatta is to keep old traditions in place but improve the experience for visitors and rowers. This year he will announce an equal number of men’s and women’s events which will be implemented in next year’s regatta.

This year, there will be the Bridge Challenge Plate, for women’s eights, the first women’s event in the intermediate category, which sits between the top category, premier and the club and student categories.

It has been created to “bridge” the gap between events while continuing the tradition of using landmarks on the Henley stretch of the River Thames. It is the first new women’s event to be added since 2021.

Mr Phelps, an advisor at Profinder, said: “One of the foremost initiatives that came out of our 2025 to 2035 strategy is gender parity. Currently, we have 16 events for men and 11 events for women.

“We have been increasing the number of women’s races every year for the last seven years. We added a whole raft of women’s events after covid in 2021.

“A lot of women’s events were added in 2016 and 2017 but they were all the international ones where we would receive three or four entries.

“We have added junior women’s eights, women’s students’ eights and women’s club eights. We initially had eight crews in each event and now we have 24. Each year, those events are getting bigger and bigger.

“How quickly the men’s and women’s events are the same size will depend on the demand of the crews to compete as there is existing demand for events which have been going for 20, 30, 70, 100 years.

“It will take time but what we have seen is that women’s rowing is expanding. I think women’s junior rowing is the fastest growing sector of this sport in the country.”

Mr Phelps said the committee has gone through a large club consultation process for the women’s events.

He said: “I’ve been driving, literally all around the country. I’ve been in Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol and Glasgow.

“I’m even going to Amsterdam to speak to our Dutch clubs which enter to find out what we should be doing, to understand what the rowing world thinks should be in our new events but we need to work out how we’re going to fit these new events into the regatta.”

Mr Phelps, who has worked in financial services for 30 years, said the committee is focused on improving the audience experience while making sure Henley benefits from the regatta year after year.

“I do have a fairly commercial and finance-orientated mind,” he said. “But first and foremost, the regatta needs to be financially sustainable and resilient and that’s good for the town because every year hundreds of thousands of people come to our regatta, who buy things and stay.

“We are working out ways we can make the regatta more inclusive so more people come to it. We’d like to work out ways in which we can expand facilities and experience Henley at its very best.

“There is no other regatta in the world where you get the deafening roar of the enclosure crowd. Every year we provide that stadium effect. We provide a great racing experience. The boat tents at the regatta are the beating heart.

“It’s where the athletes come together and Henley becomes a magical place. For rowers, for the 10 days before and during the regatta week, it’s almost like a mini-Olympic village.

“You walk around Henley and you get crews from all over the world you recognise. You’ve got school kids walking over the bridge with some of their Olympic heroes.

“We have to think about how we possibly improve that. How do we make that better. How do we make sure that for the next 10 years, rowers will always say, ‘The best competitive experience was Henley Royal Regatta’? Do we improve the boat tent, do we improve the changing rooms, do we improve the racing conditions? We will always think about that.”

Mr Phelps said that broadcasting the regatta has been a success. It was reintroduced in 2015 for the first time since 1976 and has happened every year since.

“We set the standard,” he said. “Our broadcast has got great reviews, it has won some prizes. We need to keep doing that.

“We need to keep making sure our broadcast really wows people and people who wouldn’t watch rowing watch our racing and people they know who are racing dial into our broadcast.

“We have to make sure from an enclosure, it has that ‘wow’ factor and what makes the stewards enclosure the most iconic closure in British sporting summer.

“We’re constantly looking to improve that, to tweak it here, tweak it there, add new facilities, add new experiences.

“People say Henley Royal Regatta never changes but it changes every year. Our mission is to make sure people feel it hasn’t changed.”

Mr Phelps said receiving an email in March to say that he would be giving a reading at the annual regatta service at St Mary’s Church gave him a feeling of impostor syndrome.

He said: “I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been going to that church service every year for the last 26 years’. I never thought I’d be the person standing up giving the reading.

“That’s one of the moments where you suddenly realise that it’s a huge privilege to be in this position and to be the chairman. There’s a slight case of impostor syndrome that hopefully will subside after the first year.”

He added: “I’m very pleased and proud that the sport and the regatta has evolved so much in 90 years. As we head out into the second quarter of the 21st century, there are maybe aspects of the regatta that need some attention and some change and I’m very happy to embrace that.”