Ball takes the hard approach

Hugh Matheson meets the Cambridge stroke who will set an aggressive tempo for his crew in tomorrow's Boat Race

James Ball, the stroke of the Cambridge crew which will race for its fourth successive Beefeater Trophy tomorrow afternoon, will attract attention for leading the crew from bow side, and for taking the seat from last year's winning stroke, Miles Barnett.

However, he may be the key difference in a remarkably even race. "He doesn't know how good he is," said several of the Light Blue coaching team, before discussing his high power to weight ratio and fluid rhythm.

He divided his time at King's School, Chester, between rowing on the river Dee and surfing at various points on the north Wales coast. Rowing, where you are in a crew of eight people who are entirely dependent on one another, oddly, gave him fewer opportunities for a social life than surfing - where it is dangerous to be alone.

"It's best on the sunny days when there's a big low, out in the Atlantic, putting the waves in," he said. "You sit out in the deep chatting to friends, then paddle a few strokes and pick up the swell that turns into a wave that carries you for 30 to 50 seconds. Then you paddle back out with the help of a rip tide and tell tall tales of how good it was."

His crew nickname is "Billy No-friends" but the Cambridge president, John Carver, says: "He's actually quite popular. It's just that he's happy on his own, particularly when training."

Kev Whyman, the coxswain, was a year behind Ball at school. "He was more one of the lads then," Whyman said. "Now he can sit on the minibus to Ely for 25 minutes with his head in a book, while the locker-room talk revolves around him, and never say a word."

Ball has exploded innumerable times when things go wrong. In the January training camp in Spain, there was some confusion over the finish point of a race and, after explaining the coaches' breeding to them in a volley of swearwords, he asked if they thought he was doing this for fun. Perversely, they liked this as evidence of his aggressive racing personality and put him at stroke.

This engaging talker is a highly concentrated person who is prepared for big sacrifices when he has set himself a target. After finishing fourth at the Junior World Championships, in a coxed four, he gave up rowing for his year off and went to California and Bali with the surfboard.

On his return to Cambridge he opted to row and started training a week before the start of his first term. "I missed all the fresher's `get to know you' stuff. Luckily I stayed friends with a few people I met early on, but I missed a hefty slice of social life: in bed early, just training and working. In the second year you can make compromises.

"When I arrived I was well down on fitness and faced the chop several times but hung on and, at the end of the first term, I thought there was an outside chance of the Blue Boat." He did not make it but won the reserves' race in the Goldie crew by 14 lengths and, more crucially, went on, after summer rowing, to win the trials for the Under-23 World Championships.

He professes no clear ambition and, when he went to the Netherlands, the crew was anxious only to avoid last place in the final. "We got faster each race but only when we took the lead at half-way did I believe we could win," he said. He is credited with holding the crew together and driving it over the last 1,000m to win the gold by 0.2sec.

He is slowly acknowledging that he might have further to go. "I would go to senior trials with low expectations but if a vest looked likely I'd go for it - and the same would no doubt be true if a medal was in prospect." His doubts of his ability are more likely to be the defensive reactions to the possibility of failure than to a genuine shortcoming.

Off the water, Ball is a throwback to the first hundred years of the event, which produced eight bishops. He is reading theology at Robinson College - but he is keen to make clear that theology these days is much more comparative religion and philosophy than vocational training for an English parish and, as this implies, he is in closer touch with his emotions than God.

He is not clear about what he would like to do. He is not drawn to the City "which has become a bit of a thing for Cambridge Blues." What a future employer will get is a highly motivated self-consciously disciplined achiever, long on deeds and short on small talk.