At the start of the Waterside Series, we speculated that Anoushka Freeman and Tom Sharpe could be in contention to win the DW even though only 2 mixed crews had ever won the race in its 70+ year history. Tom was coming off his record-breaking win with Keith Moule in 2023, while Anoushka was coming off two years on Team GB at World Champs for marathon and sprint followed by her first straight-through DW in 2023 – as Tom said, “I knew Noushie was fit.” With more than 760km training in the K2 together, they were probably the most thoroughly prepared team racing DW this year. But winning DW overall? Going into the race, Tom acknowledged “we knew we were in the top three, but not the favourite.” And yet, they pulled it off…

The competition

As much as they’d done to prepare, Noushie and Tom were facing fierce competition. Billy Butler and Jon O’Grady brought extensive marathon experience: Billy had three DW top finishes already, and Jon had completed the stages race as well as numerous top finishes over the years at the Waterside series. At the Watersides together this year, Billy and Jon proved that they had the speed advantage: it was close, but Billy and Jon won Waterside A nearly two minutes ahead of Noushie and Tom. They increased their lead at Waterside B, winning by nearly 4 minutes and maintained a similar lead against the mixed crew at Waterside C.

The third crew challenging for the win was Tom Simmons and Mike Lambert. Experienced and quick paddlers, this crew finished Waterside A within five seconds of Noushie and Tom. Waterside B proved a bit trickier for them, but they still finished amongst the faster crews. Mike planned to complete DW as a training run for his upcoming circumnavigation of mainland UK. But on a training session through Crofton between Waterside B and C, Mike suffered a re-injury of the shoulder he first dislocated several years ago in a surfski. Wanting to save himself for the big circumnavigation, Mike made the tough call to pull out of DW just in time for Tom to find a new partner.

Tom Simmons found a willing and eager partner in Andy Birkett. Having won DW (Teddington finish) in 2022 with Mike Lavarack, South-African born Andy also has ten Dusi finishes and multiple Fish finishes – an undeniably impressive ultra paddling CV. The other top two crews took the news seriously. Even more so when Andy and Tom finished Waterside C in 02:52:30, nearly a minute ahead of Jon O’Grady and Billy Butler, and nearly 8 minutes ahead of Anoushka Freeman and Tom Sharpe. And this was only Andy and Tom’s second time in the boat together! The Freeman/Sharpe and Butler/O’Grady teams weren’t quite shaking in their boots, but they were definitely resetting their expectations.

Getting to the start

DW was far from a sure thing this year. After the Friends of DW brought the community together to raise £25,000 in funds to support a Westminster finish, rain and rising floodwaters threatened once again. Just as the river seemed to be calming down (flow at Teddington dropping below 250 cumecs…), the rain returned in full force sending the flow right back up. Fortunately, the DW race organisers were able to use a similar assessment as last year to allow experienced crews to race despite the fast conditions. These three top crews didn’t face any issues with getting approved, and due to the high conditions, pushed their start times to some of the latest ever seen.

Hanging around the start past 5pm while watching the clock tick later and later, Noushie and Tom had already started but the two men’s crews seemed to be playing a game of chicken – who would go first? Finally, Andy Birkett and Tom Simmons set off at 5:39pm with a very smooth and speedy clothing change – they went from hanging around chatting in jeans to fully kitted out in leggings and buoyancy aids in what felt like five minutes or less. Once they were off, Billy and Jon were free to move, setting off last at exactly 6pm on Saturday.

Headwinds

The headwind and debris weren’t their only challenges on the canal: Tom and Anoushka were also dealing with a bit of a lean. They’d noticed the lean on and off over the past few months of training, and expected it to settle quickly, but it seemed to be sticking around longer than usual. Then, just as Noushie started to worry, she got back in the boat after a portage and it was gone. 

Stick to the plan

Facing these challenges and slower speed didn’t knock them off their game. Noushie said: “When we realised it wasn’t feeling as easy as it should, we decided let’s ease off and accept that four minute hit.” Tom and Noushie knew that the key for them on the canal would be pacing themselves to save their energy for the river where they’d have a better chance to pull ahead. As Tom said, “The canal was as slow as we could get away with.”

Having started so late in the day (5:13pm), Tom and Noushie found themselves in the dark by Pewsey, meaning they had to do all the portages in the dark. One of the tactics that helped them through came from their star-studded support crew who went out on bikes alongside the canal to light up each portage with their headlight. Anoushka said: “It felt like there was the sun behind me.” Despite a puncture, the bike crews made a world of difference for those dark and muddy portages.

Gaining speed while easing off

As Noushie and Tom progressed down the course with more and more flow coming in, they felt better and better. Their support crew gave them encouraging time checks as the splits started dropping and they made up time on the other crews. As early as Newbury, they’d closed the gap recorded at Pewsey.

While all three crews voiced their confidence going into the race, they hit headwinds pretty quickly – literally. On top of the headwind, the canal was also littered with a fair bit of debris – floating masses of leaves and sticks left over from recent storms – that kept getting stuck on their rudder to the point of having to back-paddle several times. While they took comfort in knowing that at least the other top crews were facing the same conditions, Tom and Noushie found themselves four minutes behind their planned schedule and 5-6 minutes behind both Andy/Tom and Billy/Jon at Pewsey. Ahead of Tom and Noushie at Pewsey as well by a few seconds was the Dutch crew of Jouke Witteveen / Floor Zegers who had a speedy start before dropping off later.

	Pewsey	Hungerford	Newbury	Aldermaston
Andy Birkett / Tom Simmons	01:33:33	03:34:58	04:59:00	06:15:47
Billy Butler / Jon O’Grady	01:33:59	03:39:38	05:02:25	06:17:35
Anoushka Freeman / Tom Sharpe	01:39:22	03:41:51	05:01:38	06:14:34

From Newbury to Reading, Noushie and Tom were moving so quickly in the high flow that they deliberately slowed themselves down: “By the time we got to Aldermaston, we were already going so much faster than our planned pace, so we deliberately went super easy. We knew that if the canal was flowing so fast, we’d need to be able to concentrate hard when we got to the river.”

Although they were moving well at this point, one of the challenges was the low bridges. In most years, it’s fairly easy for crews to lay backwards or forwards and slide under the bridges with several inches to spare. But this year, the canal was the highest almost anyone has ever seen, turning a straightforward ducking manoeuvre into a high-stakes bet that could, at best, end in a nose-scraping, time-saving duck. At worst, crews would risk losing precious minutes on making the wrong decision. During the race briefing earlier that day, race director Owen Peake reminded crews that low bridges are the number one cause of injuries during DW (other than presumably the standard injuries one gets from paddling for 15-30 hours straight).

At one of these low bridges, Noushie and Tom approached it planning to sneak under – the best judgement they could make in the dark. Nearing the bridge, Tom called it – no way would they fit under. Immediately, they put the brakes on, backed up, and picked a side to portage. Noushie explained: “We didn’t know which was the right side because we’d never portaged the bridge before.” They lost at least a minute in the process of figuring it out. If the final race times had been tighter, this moment might have looked a lot more significant in retrospect – but as Tom said, “Everyone has a few minutes like that. It’s inevitable.” Noushie added: “Whenever we had things like that, neither of us ever got panicked or frustrated at the other… When you’re cold, and it’s dark, and it’s the middle of the night, and you’re tired, it’s very easy to kind of start pointing fingers.” Teamwork was clearly one of the strengths driving Tom and Anoushka’s success this year. With their power in the boat and trust in each other, the lost time from these hurdles wasn’t enough to set them back: they just kept gaining speed.

Tom said: “I always knew, or thought, we would be relatively stronger the further and further we got… In fact, we were the strongest from much earlier than I thought we would be.” Tom had told Noushie he’d be happy if they were 15 minutes behind at Reading, knowing they could make it up. By Reading, they had sped up enough to take a clear lead.

Swirls, whorls, and weirs

From Reading, racers entered the Thames in perhaps the highest conditions the DW has ever been run on. In 2023, the hype for a fast-flowing Thames was high, but the 2024 conditions turned out to be an entirely new level of fast. During Tom’s record-breaking race with Keith Moule last year, they reached Reading and he thought: “This is it? We were promised a raging torrent…” The water levels came down quickly in the days before DW 2023, making it a fast year but not as fast as it had been hyped up. This year, the hype was very real.

“Noushie and I planned to go 15 seconds / kilometre faster on that bit than Keith and I did last year.” Tom felt a bit apprehensive that this target was too ambitious. But arriving at Reading and finding the raging torrent he’d been falsely promised last year, Tom quickly found that the ambitious target was spot on. Tom and Noushie’s pace from Reading was indeed faster than Tom’s pace with Keith the previous year. Mitigating the joy of fast speeds though was an attitude of caution.

As water levels rise on the Thames and the flow gets faster, swirls appear in spots that would normally be calm. In tippy kayaks, your stability and speed comes in large part from being able to place as much body weight onto the blade each stroke as possible and rotate around that solid catch. When the blade catches on a swirl, that catch is no longer solid and suddenly starts to feel slippy – in this moment, even experienced paddlers with excellent stability can find themselves suddenly upside-down. Facing swirls in unexpected places, in the dark, facing exhaustion from having paddled so many hours already, with the looming risk of getting pushed by the current over a killer weir – whorls present a clear and present danger.

Tom and Noushie proceeded carefully: “With all the flow, we were pretty cautious actually… We’re familiar with the swirls, but once you’re seven hours in, you just don’t know how it’s going to be. There were new bits of water rushing into the canal like at Thatcham – never normally there at Waterside B. We just took them steady. You’re not going to lose any time by putting your paddles down for a bit, but you can waste a lot of time if you fall in.”

The mid-race announcement no one wanted

While the race’s iconic Westminster finish had been in jeopardy a few weeks prior, it was looking likely again after the Friends of DW stepped in to raise funds. That is – until Mother Nature and the Port of London Authority (PLA) intervened. When almost all DW crews had set off on race day, the race organisers convened the fastest crews for an unexpectedly disappointing race briefing. The organisers announced that since the last couple of days of rain, there was a surge of water still moving down the river, and the PLA’s measurement of what would be considered safe water levels was about two centimetres too high. The PLA rules the tideway, so without their sign-off, the race wouldn’t be allowed to continue past Teddington. There was a 50/50 chance that the level would drop enough while the paddlers were racing to allow a Westminster finish, but otherwise they’d get pulled off the water at Teddington.

Although these top teams surely considered continuing downriver for an unofficial record, the race organisers had marshalls covering Teddington Lock and made it clear that any racers doing so would be banned from future DW’s. Hearing the news so close to the race start was difficult for the racers in terms of motivation and the mental game, but Tom reflected later that it was almost beneficial “because we didn’t have time to think about alternative plans or whether it was worth it or anything like that.” In the end, fear of a ban and respect for the race and its organisers meant that no one flaunted the PLA’s ruling.

It was around 2:30am mid-race that the announcement became official: the water level was still above the PLA’s stated limit, and the race would finish at Teddington. Knowing to expect the announcement around that time based on the info shared at the briefing, Tom and Anoushka started asking their support crew as early as Marsh. Noushie said: “I remember thinking Steve was lying to me because he looked so stunned every time I asked. But they didn’t know.” Later on, their support crew lead Lizzie Broughton met them at Marlow. Tom recounted: “First of all, she gave us the information that Andy was out, and then she snuck in the fact that we were going to Teddington only… it was just a rush of information.” It was a “massive disappointment. And for a short period of time at least, the intensity or motivation probably did take a hit… We realised it was still a good race though and it was just the last bit that was chopped off. It was still a thing to achieve and we were doing it.”

Andy Birkett and Tom Simmons had dropped out of the race when they reached Marsh. At Dreadnought Reach, their support crew had flagged that Tom was having some stomach issues. By Marsh, they became one of the 37% of crews who had to retire. Considering some of the factors that affect DW race performance, Tom and Andy had faced several challenges: they had only come together as a team a few weeks before DW after Mike Lambert’s shoulder injury; Tom Simmons hadn’t completed DW straight-through before; and they were under a fair bit of pressure and expectation from being the favourites to win the race. DW has many retirees each year, and with the added challenge of extraordinarily fast flow, 2024 had record rates of drop-out: 

Noushie noted that the timing of hearing the news at Marlow ultimately worked out well for them: “It really worked in our favour that we found out when we were at a good point in our race.” Finding out about Andy and Tom dropping out was further motivation because the thought: “well, we’ve got to win this now. That was the only consolation, and we were in a position where we could win it.” Had they found out early in the race like at Pewsey when they were behind, Noushie said, it would have been really disheartening.

“Unfinished business”

Buoyed by increasingly realistic prospects of an overall win, Noushie and Tom kept the pace up all the way to their triumphant finish at Teddington. They ended up finishing in 13:43:46. Of course it’s hard to say if they would have taken the overall race record had it finished at Westminster, but they would have undeniably had a good shot at it. They certainly would have taken the mixed record. Their victory in the overall race was clear – after Andy Birkett and Tom Simmons dropped out, Billy Butler and Jon O’Grady finished more than twenty minutes behind Noushie and Tom in 14:09:05. Ed Dobson and Mike Rees-Clark came third in 14:49:52.

At the finish, Jon and Billy were happy with their accomplishment. Jon acknowledged, “I went to some dark places”, an experience not uncommon for DW racers. Like Andy and Tom, Jon and Billy didn’t have nearly as many kilometres in the boat together as Noushie and Tom, and this year was Jon’s first straight-through DW. 2024 will go down in DW history as one of the most difficult years: of the 68 crews who started, only 43 finished. And these were all crews who had passed a rigorous screening by the race directors to ensure they were fit and prepared to handle the dangerous conditions. The favourites for both K2 Senior (Andy Birkett and Tom Simmons) and C2 (Sam Bowen and Steve Hughes) both retired. Experienced crews, including Mark Ball and Steve Bush who have six DW finishes between them, retired. Ben Smell and Tim Snee finished DW together in 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2023. In 2024, they retired at Marsh.

With DW 2025 scheduled later in the season (19 April, mark your calendar), the odds of a Westminster finish for everyone look much better. Though the odds of fast flow and a new overall race record could be lower. That said, it could end up being the perfect balance between safety and fast flow that every DW paddler dreams of… As Tom and Anoushka agreed: “DW is a multiyear game.” And for them, that means they have unfinished business. As a crew, Tom and Anoushka have shown themselves to be one of the best DW teams in the race’s history. If they return in the coming years, they’re likely to sweep up a lot more accolades together… and hopefully some of the records they were after this year. Tom and Noushie will remain a team to watch…