A Long Time Coming

Heidi Long: “I’ve never experienced an intensity like it”.

© Benedict Tufnell

New recruit Heidi Long believes 2025 will be the year Oxford end their seven-race losing streak. The Team GB medallist on keeping alive the memory of her father, who passed away sixteen months before the Paris 2024 Games.

“I’ve never met someone so determined,” Heidi Long says. Her voice falters as she remembers her late father, Keith, who died of pancreatic cancer two years ago this April. An hour into our conversation it’s obvious the Olympic bronze medallist shares similar qualities with her much-loved father. “[He had] endless positivity and such a resilient mindset; no matter what was going on it was a case of pick yourself up, put a smile on your face, and be around the people that you love,” she adds. Lady Margaret Hall seems unusually quiet. The first to offer an Oxford education to women, Heidi’s college was founded in 1878 and its red brick buildings lie north of the city centre overlooking the University Park and the River Cherwell. Along the hallways and across the pristine quads, we pass just a handful of students before settling into the Old Library —a spacious pillar-lined room with a grand piano in the corner and paintings of austere-looking figures on the walls —where Heidi reflects on losing her father, medalling at the Paris Olympics, and the atmosphere in the Oxford women’s rowing team.

Dreaming of an Oxford revival

The 28-year-old is set to stroke Oxford’s women’s Blue Boat and fervently believes her crew can end Cambridge’s seven-race winning run. Heidi joined the team a little late after cutting short her post-Olympic travels around India. She loves her new, navy-clad team and the chance to share her knowledge with younger, up-and-coming athletes.

“I’ve been blown away by the women on the team and the coaches too, they’re all so hardworking. There’s a real momentum being built here. It’s given me a new perspective and I’ve enjoyed passing on what I’ve learnt over the years, trying to help lead them, and be someone the rowers can talk to. The squad itself is so much fun to be with.”

One person who stands in the way of Heidi’s hopes of turning the tide for Oxford is American Olympian Claire Collins, who finished fifth in the women’s eights at the Paris Games; the same event in which Heidi won a bronze medal for GB. Claire looks likely to be Heidi’s opposite woman, sat in the stroke seat of the Cambridge boat. “We will be pitted against one another in a way,” says Heidi, “but it’s awesome that we have such a similar track record.”

“There are so many different elements to grief. Only on the water could I escape my thoughts.”

Claire and Heidi’s sporting careers have been strangely interlinked, facing off against each other in many races. “I only realised the extent of it while on stage being interviewed at The Boat Race’s launch event, the Presidents’ Challenge. We have so many shared experiences, it’s like she’s my doppelgänger from a parallel universe!”

Heidi pauses. She listens as the muffled notes of Auld Lang Syne drift into the Old Library. In the gardens below, a lone bagpipe player rehearses ahead of a Burns Night formal dinner, one which Heidi is hoping to attend, “They’ll be addressing the haggis,” she says with a smile.

The conversation turns to food and health. Haggis aside, Heidi is aiming to only eat whole foods for a whole month. “It takes time and effort but should give me some real world experience,” she says. Her research for a Master’s in Women’s and Reproductive Health examines the impact of ultra-processed food on women’s fertility.

She has always taken an interest in how things work at the biological level, especially within the spheres of rowing physiology and sports nutrition. Her time as a participant for Project Minerva, a study to better understand the health and performance of female rowers, was particularly eye-opening.

“We submitted regular saliva samples and ovulation tests to track hormone changes over the menstrual cycle. Sport has changed so much; now we know it’s unhealthy to not have your period, whereas previously I’ve been on teams where it was seen as a good sign that you lost your period, like you’re training so hard and pushing the limit.”

Questioning the modern food landscape was in part prompted by her father’s cancer diagnosis. “He was a fit man in his fifties. It made me question the environment in which we live, particularly the impact of ultra-processed foods.”

Her father’s battle with cancer

Six months. That’s how long the doctors expected Keith to live when they told him he had cancer. Heidi’s father was given a choice of chemotherapy treatments: one had better efficacy but worse side effects, the other less effective and more tolerable. He chose the former.

“Dad was never going to take the easy way; he went with the most brutal option. Life’s precious so how can I make the most of it, that was dad,” says Heidi. “Most people last three months max, but he stuck it out for a year. I’m sure he hid many side-effects from us. He absolutely fought to stay on that treatment for as long as possible.”

Keith tracked his progress. Each month the numerically-minded Keith updated his family with his medical data and blood counts. “He was a numbers guy: if he could, he’d always find a way to put things in a spreadsheet!” Heidi says with love, smiling at the memory.

Confounding doctors’ expectations, Keith’s resilience enabled him to live his last years to the fullest, but, says Heidi, it meant the end came quick. “The slope was very steep and very short,” she says. The week of her father’s passing coincided with one of Heidi’s major Olympic selection races. “He was admitted on the Monday and passed away on the Friday, and that Thursday I had my race.”

She won. “I wanted to tell him, so I went straight from Caversham [the GB National Training Centre] to the hospital. By this point he was coming in and out of being himself but I managed to have that conversation, I got across that I’d made the boat and I knew that he knew. He always believed in me so much more than I ever did, right from the get-go he had no doubts that I’d make it.”

That afternoon the Macmillan palliative care nurse who was treating Keith told Heidi’s mum, Jill, that the time was near. Heidi’s brothers, Joe and Sam, who were studying in the US, rushed home. “We managed to get my grandparents to the hospital and my dad’s side of the family. My dad was a hugely popular man; if word had got out, honestly, the whole village would have swamped Wexham Park Hospital,” says Heidi, sobbing and laughing through the tears. The next morning Heidi left her uncle and girlfriend at the hospital to collect her brothers from the airport. “We made it back in time,” she says, the emotion still painfully raw. “Dad told us he loved us and he knew we were all there.”

In the weeks and months that followed Heidi struggled to come to terms with the loss. “Small things became huge, the idea of cooking a meal or even just clearing up seemed too much to comprehend.

Family friends would come around to cook, clear up, and just sit with us. They really held us together,” says Heidi. And her rowing? “It’s addictive. If you’re finding it hard to sleep, think and function then being outside in nature, doing something you’re good at, where you’re able to switch your brain off helps.” Being around her teammates helped too: “They gave me the sense that life would keep going”.

“There are so many different elements to grief that affect you in different ways. Only on the water could I escape my thoughts and what was happening. I’d do one session and then go home and basically sleep for the rest of the day,” says Heidi, who monitored her biological markers to guide her gradual return to full training. “My sleep looked like the most intense erg [indoor rowing session] I’d ever done. It was exhausting.” She smiles. “Dad would have loved to go through those numbers.”

Throughout his illness Keith managed his chemo to fit around his family, he made sure he could travel to watch his children’s rowing races and important life events. “He prioritised us. He was always there for us. Even at the end he put us ahead of himself: ‘Make sure nothing gets in the way of what you all are doing. I don’t want people to have to come back for funerals’.”

One of the last things Keith did was organise for the Longs to watch Heidi row at the Olympics. “He showed us the log-in details for the Paris tickets and accommodation. At that point I had no idea which boat I’d be in, but he’d bought tickets for everything!”

Tears are flowing freely – both Heidi’s and mine – she says it’s a privilege to keep his story alive. “I found this Christmas significantly harder than last Christmas. Those sixteen months were so intense, but your body finds a way to cope. It’s been long enough now that this Christmas your body starts to realise, ah something’s different, something’s missing.”

Winning a medal at the Paris Olympics

Keith Long didn’t get to see his daughter stand atop the Olympic dais and receive her medal, but Heidi’s unequivocal as to his, and her mum’s, impact in helping to get her there.

“They’ve always been so supportive. I used to go to football in the evenings after I started rowing at school. Dad picked me up in the car and had a fully cooked meal ready to eat on the way to football. And the next morning it’d be breakfast on the way to swimming. I did a lot of sport, it was fun. I was good but never exceptional. No matter what, mum and dad were always proud. It wasn’t the result that mattered, it was about building connections with other people.”

“It’s taken me ten years to get here, is that crazy? It’s always worth persevering.”

Heidi says those underlying messages of using sport to learn about yourself and others remained as she rose through the ranks and became more high performance focused. “It helps offset the pressure. I’ve always put pressure on myself – any top athlete will – but it never came from my family; I just wanted to do them proud.”

Heidi joined the senior GB Rowing Team in the aftermath of a disappointing national performance at the Tokyo Olympics. She established herself as a key member of the new-look team and was tasked with reviving Great Britain’s golden record.

Dubbed the Paris Project, Heidi’s cohort of athletes fell in with the Tokyo returners and were quick to right the ship, dominating the 2022 World Rowing Championships. As a member of the women’s four, Heidi was unbeaten in the 2022 season and won a silver medal at the European Rowing Championships the following year, alongside double Olympic champion Helen Glover. “The four is so beautiful to row. Some days I honestly felt like I was part of a Make-a-Wish Foundation experience.”

The final year of an Olympiad is notoriously tough. “So tight!” Heidi says of the GB Rowing Team’s 2024 selection battle royale. “You sense it in the air as soon as you walk in the building; I’ve never experienced an intensity like it.” Heidi secured a place in the bows of the British eight. “We had a fantastic opportunity ahead of us and a relatively short amount of time to do it; the odds weren’t necessarily in our favour.”

Despite fierce pressure from the American and Australian crews, Heidi’s eight won a bronze medal behind gold medallists Romania and Canada’s defending Olympic champions. It was a huge turn around for the British, and only the second time in history that a Team GB women’s eight had medalled at the Games. “The whole experience was phenomenal, looking back it almost doesn’t feel real. I was living the dream,” says Heidi. “It’s a real honour to have been a part of such a successful Olympic women’s squad.”

“I didn’t realise how close we were to silver,” says Heidi. She doesn’t remember much of the actual race, nor crossing the finish line, such was her exhaustive efforts, but when she met her mum after the race she was overjoyed. “She gave me a big hug. She’d been crying and looked quite nervous,” says Heidi, explaining that her mum was worried Heidi might have been disappointed. “Mum asked, ‘It’s not gold, are you OK?’ I said, ‘Mum I’m so happy!’”

“Standing on top of the podium was pure happiness. Sometimes you finish a race and it’s a relief, but this was happiness and nothing else,” says Heidi. Her teammates in the women’s four, who were tipped for gold, won a hard-fought silver medal having been rowed down by the Dutch in the last strokes of a nail-biting final. “Who knows what my journey would’ve looked like in a different boat,” says Heidi, “but I wouldn’t trade my time in the eight, or the medal we won. I just wouldn’t risk it.”

Over fifty of Heidi’s friends and family travelled to Paris to watch her race. Paris must have been a light at the end of the tunnel for many of Keith’s loved ones, a focus to help pull them through their grief. “I feel lucky to have such a close family, it’s not always a given. Maybe it [Paris Olympics] helped. The Longs are still getting up, going out everyday and trying to pursue their dreams – we should too! I hope so.”

The unseen bagpiper has long since packed away their pipes and the afternoon light is fading. Heidi checks her watch; she and her teammates have a series of intense indoor rowing pieces to do this evening in preparation for a longer test later in the week which will mimic the physiological demands of The Boat Race.

A decade on from her first application to study at Oxford, and two rejection letters later, Heidi is living her Boat Race dream. “It’s taken me ten years to get here, is that crazy? It’s always worth persevering.”