Before the 1987 Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge, the Oxford men’s crew, unhappy at the selection policy imposed upon them by their coach, Dan Topolski, staged a mutiny.
The front page news was covered with such clarity and fairness by the Guardian’s rowing correspondent Chris Dodd, who has died aged 83, that the Oxford crew involved subsequently approached him for advice on how they might put across their case to the public. However, with the same impartiality with which he had covered the story, Dodd reluctantly declined to help the young rowers, later recalling that “it would [have been] unethical for me to offer advice … because I was an observer, not a player”.
That stance was typical of Chris’s journalistic integrity, and indicative of the respect and trust that he engendered among rowers.
Until his arrival on the national newspaper scene in the early 1970s, most articles about the sport were written by former oarsmen, who tended to focus on technique rather than the drama or intrigue of any given situation, and were often beholden to the British rowing establishment.
Chris’s confidence and elan gave him the ability to forge a new kind of writing in the sphere, a style that was unencumbered by worries about rocking the boat – as his coverage of the spirit of that rebellious Oxford crew demonstrated.
Nobody in the field – past or present – has come up to Chris’s standards. A quietly spoken, private man, he was head and shoulders above the rest of his journalistic colleagues, of whom I was one – in the stories he gathered, the books he wrote and the deep knowledge he accumulated about the sport.
However, Chris’s outstanding achievement was the role he played in the creation of the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, which opened in the late 90s. He first came up with the idea in 1984, after deciding that there really ought to be an institution that properly told the story of the sport he loved.
To get the project to fruition was a huge organisational task beyond Chris’s core journalistic capabilities, but, armed with a great ability to network, cajole and persuade, over the next few years he assembled a force of like-minded visionaries, found funding, and searched collections for display pieces. After the museum’s opening in 1998 he became its curator and rowing historian emeritus.
That the museum had to close last year for economic reasons does not detract from his monumental achievement in creating it.
Born in Bristol, Chris was the son of Dora and John Dodd, who worked in medical insurance. Educated at Clifton college, where he became stroke of the school’s second eight, he gained an arts degree from Nottingham University before finding employment with the Guardian in Manchester in 1965 as a subeditor in its features department. He moved in 1970 to London where, among other duties, he worked on production of the fashion and women’s pages, at a time of much greater use of photographs and the first colour layouts.
In 1976, Chris was asked by the editor, Peter Preston, to redesign the sports pages. It was a marathon task and led to him becoming deputy sports editor for the four years until 1980. Though he enjoyed that task, Chris admitted he was not a sports fan – with one exception: rowing.
Chris started writing about rowing for the Guardian almost by accident in 1969, when the Guardian’s correspondent, John Rodda, was unable to make finals day at Henley Regatta. Though Rodda continued to write the lion’s share of reports for events such as the Boat Race and the Olympics, Chris increasingly began to cover for him and write engaging features on the sport. In 1981, he turned to covering all major rowing events for the paper.
He went freelance in 1994, chiefly to begin getting the River and Rowing Museum off the ground. But he continued to write for the Guardian until 2003, and to contribute to the obituaries pages thereafter.
The style Chris developed influenced a new generation of rowing journalists, including Rachel Quarrell and Hugh Matheson, with both of whom he later collaborated. With Quarrell he co-founded the online magazine Rowing Voice in 2006, and with Matheson co-wrote the biography More Power: Jurgen Grobler – The Most Successful Olympic Coach of All Time (2018). Among his other books were The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1983) and The Story of World Rowing (1992).
He also became the first editor, in 1987, of Rowing and Regatta magazine and a founder member in 1990 of World Rowing’s media commission.
Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease for many years, Chris remained lucid until the end. He is survived by his long-term partner, Liz Ransley, whom he first met when they were students at Nottingham University.
• Christopher John Dodd, journalist and author, born 14 February 1942; died 25 January 2026
