BUCS Regatta 2026 — Saturday Preview

Eight finals on the cards today, some categories are runaways, others are wide open. Here's how the pickers see it.

The Locks

Women's Championship 4x — Reading A (Meg Knight) | 79% A near-unanimous call. Four-fifths of pickers have Reading A and nobody else cracks 5%. If they don't deliver, the leaderboard is going to look very different on Sunday morning.

Open Championship 1x — Reading A (Matt Long) | 78% The same story in the men's single. Brookes' Teddy Sherman (7%) and Oxford's James Fetter (6%) are the only meaningful counter-picks. Anyone backing the field here is making a bold play.

Open Championship 8+ — Brookes A (Marine Arnerich) | 75% Three-quarters of the room expects Brookes A to do the business. Durham (16%) is the only crew with anything like a following. The contrarian's race!

Open Intermediate 8+ — Brookes A (Julia Ortiz) | 63% Brookes A again, this time in the Intermediate eight. Durham A (16%) and Cambridge A (6%) are the next best regarded — but the bulk of the field sits at fractions of a percent. A 47-boat category and the picks pile up on one crew.

The Toss-Ups

Women's Championship 2- This is the race of the day for prediction value. Four crews within 12 points of each other:

• Edinburgh (Madeleine Fatani) — 24%
• Durham A (Tabitha Butterfill) — 21%
• Cambridge A (Antonia Galland) — 19%
• Newcastle (Harriet Taylor) — 13%

Whoever gets this right is going to do well — there's no consensus to ride.

Women's Intermediate 2- A 30-boat category and the favourites are spread thin:

• Cambridge A (Eloise Etherington) — 32%
• Newcastle A (Megan Davies) — 20%
• Durham A (Charlotte Dargue) — 14%
• Edinburgh A (Lara Thomson) — 10%

Cambridge A leads the call but a long way short of a lock.

Women's Beginner 4x

• Edinburgh (Nienke Nederhorst) — 40%
• Queen's A (Sophia Cahill) — 16%
• Reading — 14%

Edinburgh is the favourite but more than half the room has gone elsewhere. Plenty of upside in the field.

Open Beginner 4+ The most evenly split race of the day. The top four are all in the 12–17% band:

• Surrey A (Seb Alba) — 17%
• Imperial A (Lottie Jones) — 16%
• Queen's A (Ruan Austin) — 13%
• Brookes (Nathan Parker) — 13%

Effectively a four-way coin flip. Big margins available for whoever calls it right.

Numbers

• 8 finals across Open and Women's, from Beginner to Championship
• 208 crews with predictions logged
• Heaviest consensus: Reading A in W Championship 4x (79%)
• Most contested: Open Beginner 4+ (top four within 5 points)

What the leaders are doing

Twenty-four players sit jointly top of the leaderboard on 111 points with perfect picks so far. Saturday will not leave that group intact.

The race that holds them together. Open Intermediate 8+ is 24/24 on Brookes A (Julia Ortiz) — every leader has the same pick. It moves nobody.

The races that hand the lead to a single player. Three of Saturday's near-locks have 23 of 24 leaders on the favourite, with one lone dissenter:

• Open Championship 1x — 23 on Reading A (Matt Long), with Fantasy Rowing User 88 the lone backer of Brookes' Teddy Sherman.
• Open Championship 8+ — 23 on Brookes A, with SashaYappa the only leader picking Durham (Sebastian Iles) for the upset.
• Women's Championship 4x — 23 on Reading A (Meg Knight), with Fantasy Rowing User 88 alone on Edinburgh's Penny Irvine.

If any of those favourites loses, the dissenter walks away from the chasing pack with a clear lead. Hold serve and the dissenter quietly drops a place behind the other 23.

The biggest outlier in the lead group. Fantasy Rowing User 88 has four solo contrarian calls across Saturday's slate — Brookes in the Open 1x, Loughborough A in the Women's Beginner 4x, St Andrews in the Women's Championship 2-, and Edinburgh in the Women's Championship 4x. Four upsets and they win the regatta outright. None and they fall four places behind the rest of the pack. Either way, theirs is the most exposed card in the room.

The races that scatter the leaders. The contested categories are where the tie actually breaks:

• Open Beginner 4+ — the leaders split eight ways. Surrey A (Seb Alba) leads with seven backers, Imperial A (Lottie Jones) has six, Queen's A (Ruan Austin) three. Whoever wins, at most seven of the 24 stay on points. Liz_Rose stands alone on Durham's Kyle Simpson here.
• Women's Intermediate 2- — five different crews backed. Newcastle A (Megan Davies) leads the call with eight, Cambridge A six, Durham A five. Megatron is alone on Oxford's Phoebe Forward.
• Women's Championship 2- — Edinburgh (Madeleine Fatani) is the soft favourite at 13, but Newcastle, Durham A and Oxford each have three backers. An upset wipes ~80% of the lead group off the perfect line.
• Women's Beginner 4x — Edinburgh (Nienke Nederhorst) leads at 14, with Queen's A on five and Reading on four.

Bottom line for the leaders. Even if every favourite holds, the perfect-pick group shrinks from 24 down to roughly five to seven by Saturday evening — only those who happened to back the right crew in each of the four contested races stay clean. The locks reward the consensus. The contested races crown the regatta.

SuperLeague — the squad battle

The squad standings tell a sharper story than the individual leaderboard. Reading Uni are clear, but the chasing pack is bunched:

Good luck tomorrow!