Rowing clubs cancel training after Boat Race as 'pool of human excrement' in the Thames

Two London rowing clubs were forced to cancel training last week ahead of Henley after pools of human excrement were found in the River Thames. It comes after the Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins spoke out about “poo in the water” following March’s Boat Race.

According to the Daily Mail, long-established west London institutions Furnivall Sculling Club and Vesta Rowing Club scrapped their sessions after videos showed the excrement floating on top of the water. The waste had pooled on Putney Embankment near Fulham FC’s Craven Cottage stadium.

Vesta’s safety officer informed rowers of the cancellation via text and put the reason down to the “conditions with the sewage [on Thursday]”, before advising “non-squad or single scullers avoid going out for the next 24 hours”.

Furnivall captain Evelyn Tichy confirmed her team cancelled their Friday session as she said of the Tideway strip of water: “It looks a bit like oil slicks of excrement on the Thames. I personally have rowed on the Tideway for about 10 years, and I have never seen it this bad. At least 10 members of the club in the last six months have been out for a week or more because of infection, and that's not a normal number for us. A normal number is one in the same period.

“It has a massive detrimental effect on [our] competitiveness. If you have a high proportion of your top rowers, or even just two or three on your top boats, out because they're not able to train because they’re ill, or if you're not able to get on the water because the water quality is so bad, that has a huge knock on effect.”

And she added: “People considering the sport have increasingly asked, ‘Is this a safe thing for me to be doing?’ I think there's a really fundamental problem with political will and investment in water quality in this country. Unless there's a large structural change, I'm sceptical about whether that will happen anytime soon.”

In March, Oxford captain Jenkins admitted he was throwing up before the Boat Race and almost didn’t make it to the start line. His team were comprehensively beaten by Cambridge.

“I will say - and this is in no way to take away from Cambridge - but we've had a few guys come down with the E.coli strain,” he told the BBC. “This morning I was throwing up and I really wasn't sure whether I was going to make it into the boat. It would have been ideal not to have so much poo in the water - but that’s not to take away from Cambridge.”

Meanwhile, a Thames Water spokesperson addressed the sewage issue as they explained: “Sewage discharges are unacceptable to us and our customers, and we’re working hard to stop them, in the face of the wettest weather in a decade. We were the first company to publish an online map providing close to real-time information about storm discharges from all our permitted locations, putting transparency at the heart of what we do.”