A Shrewsbury rower will achieve a lifetime’s ambition by taking part in one of the world’s most famous sporting events.

Fred Gill, 24, will be competing in the Cambridge boat for the 156th University Boat Race next month.

Mr Gill, a member of Pengwern Boat Club in Shrewsbury, was named in the two seat for the race, which dates from 1829.

And though born in Oxford, it’s the city’s arch rivals he will be representing when the four-and-a-quarter-mile race takes place on April 3. The former Shrewsbury School pupil, who only took up rowing four years ago, said: “It is a massive honour to win a Blue, but it is all about winning the race now.

“You see the names of the crews going back all those years in the Cambridge boathouse and at the bottom it says ‘won’ or ‘lost’, that’s pretty stark.”

When the crews line up on the start at Putney, Mr Gill will come face-to-face again with Dutch national sculler Sjoerd Hamburger, the 6ft 8in tall Olympian, who was among the Oxford crew which beat the Kenley man’s boat by a single foot in a Henley Royal Regatta epic last summer.

“Hopefully, it’s pay back time,” said Mr Gill, who knew he was in the Cambridge crew after impressing in pairs trials in January on the Barcelona Olympic lake.

“I’d had some good results during the winter, including finishing second on a rowing machine bleep test, so I knew I was in the frame, and then won the trial eights race stroking one of the boats over the boat race course in December.”