Growing up, I was fascinated by the idea of England football players propping up the weight of a nation’s hope. People have loved football forever and the thought that humanity has stood in stalls and screamed and cried under the same flag for hundreds of years made me think playing could only give you a feeling which couldn’t be written down. Trailing the long cape of sporting history was somehow deeply moving to a (perhaps abnormally) soul-searching eight-year-old me who knew nothing about football.
Eighteen-year-old me, who knew nothing about rowing, revisited some of those feelings when I learnt about this unfamiliar sport’s long-standing entwinement with Oxford. I tried to remain cool and aloof from what on the outside seemed overly technical and equipment-y, and therefore geeky to the cool personality I was trying to play off.
Truthfully, I had not watched a single Boat Race before I attended the university. But I swiftly developed a habit of watching old races on YouTube, mostly because it was the best rowing I’d ever seen after the foray into college rowing which left me with two distinct impressions – it didn’t matter if you won or lost, and it was mostly for the kit.
During this period the idea that people would give up their time, their social life, and seemingly their sanity, to battle people they had never met and knew nothing about, but by whom they needed to be totally consumed, was baffling to me. And yet talking about the possibility of trying to make the team became a hangnail I couldn’t stop fiddling with and wanted to pull at, because a rivalry which had stood the weathering of hundreds of years seemed akin to how I felt once about football.
Almost three years since I suffered my Boat Race loss, I have at times reflected on those two years of training – resulting in one cancellation and one relocation to Ely – with a certain emptiness that Covid introduced to milestone events for many of us.
Strangely now, I cringe a little at my initial earnestness, because when I did start rowing with the now retired Oxford University Women’s Boat Club, I felt alienated from 178 years of history around me – firstly because I was not one of the upper middle class men for whom the race was originally run; but also because I was searching for the kind of stuff mythologised in True Blue or The Boys in the Boat, held up as blueprints for the real hard stuff by people who admittedly were not particularly in the know.
The superlatives run dry in Robinson and Topolski’s writing, painting a perhaps slightly unfamiliar picture. “Old oarsmen once believed it could knock five years off a man’s life just to have taken part. […] Ambulances are waiting at the finish. […] The Boat Race is a pure throwback to the bareknuckle days of sport.”
The racehorse precision of athletes today seems a far cry from their rough and ready tableaux. Reference to the ‘grim, private glory’ of the race and valorisation of ‘The Last Amateurs’ sits squarely at odds with the official organiser’s claims that 250,000 people will line the banks and ‘millions more’ watch on television.
More than this, the near encyclopedic accounts of the athletes’ lives and training in the run-up and race-day coverage briefly catapults them onto the level of celebrity athletes. In the extended coverage ahead of the weekend through the ‘Turning the Tide’ series we have also seen OUBC head coach Sean Bowden stating that the race is not “a learn to row programme. This is not Parkrun.”
The development of the sport globally in general makes it hard to bridge the gap from men in wool and jerseys with flimsy wooden oars to the finely tuned, Lycra-clad athletes pumping round in carbon shells today.
Cast your mind back to the mid-2000s and you can see how the spirit of technological advancement dominated the now dated and a little corny production and editing which made the rowers seem like astronauts about to be shot into space. Even the building of the original OUBC boathouse was initially a begrudging commission in 1880 following years of boating from barges. Boathouses in general were seen as cumbersome frivolities by some who believed the rivers should remain untouched.
For me, the feeling in 2021 that our efforts were for commercial exploit, leading us to be brought out of lockdown early for training along with a select group of other athletes deemed appropriately ‘elite’, betrayed a sly feeling that as an institution, the Boat Race had been hollowed out by money.
This is something I spoke about with the King twins Catherine and Gemma, racing respectively for Osiris and the Cambridge Blue Boat. They agree with me that some of the preparation and coverage can make you feel not just like race horses, but show ponies.
They say, “People forget we’re just students at the end of the day”.
Of course ‘just students’ suggests something pedestrian about their study, when this is the one challenge of being a Boat Race rower which most other athletes cannot imagine. It is an element of their responsibilities which has come under fire in more recent years with the increasing prevalence of international level athletes and Olympians working their way onto niche courses in order to tick the race off the bucket list, particularly in post-Olympic years. People might remember Thorsten Engelmann in the 2007 race, who promptly dropped out of his course post win and returned to train with the German national team. He was stripped of his ‘Blue’ award, yet critics could not help but feel his actions threatened the spirit of the race.
The pair have been a source of media interest due to the poignancy of their sibling rivalry, particularly since Catherine has also raced with CUBC since 2018 until this season. I was interested to learn whether her move to the dark side was at all discombobulating for them both. Seemingly there would be a blurred line in the recognition of one’s sister and someone who now stands before you as a supposed enemy.
Gemma, however, insists that they have “faced friends before – at the end of the day we’re just doing whatever we can to make the boat go fast.” They describe a “mutual understanding” of knowing what’s acceptable to share and not, revealing even some relief it has afforded: “It’s nice not being compared every day.”
The last time there was a media interest like this was in 2003, when brothers James (Cambridge) and David Livingston (Oxford) and Matt (Oxford) and Ben Smith (Cambridge) competed against each other across the two boats in the closest finish ever of a one-foot victory to Oxford. It was naturally something of a media storm, a titanic fraternal tussle as flesh and blood went toe to toe.
I mention, perhaps in my cynicism, the possibility that this whiff of something slightly more sensational becomes a more tantalising opportunity for modern athletes than simply the chance to race as part of something bigger than oneself.
Catherine mentions how she has now had the privilege of experiencing the dark and light blue mergers.
She said, “I’m excited to be part of something new – we can push forward with the men’s team and make positive changes as a united squad.” Not only is her answer surprisingly optimistic and open-minded, her words trigger the realisation for me that times have changed – and it’s a good thing.
There’s no exceptional need to live up to history or tradition, because with each Boat Race crew, they lay one more stone in paving the way forward. Gemma also gives credit in particular to their Head Coach, Paddy Ryan, for his approach to understanding female physiology in training, connecting this to the barrage of positive developments since the 2015 movement to the Tideway which opened the floodgates for possibility in the women’s race.
I also spoke with Oxford Blue Boat cox, Will Denegri, a former Brookes teammate, to get his perspective on the relevance of the race today. I wonder if the change of scenery from Henley Royal Regatta has at all been overwhelming in the intensification of spectator focus.
He said: “It’s a weird shifting of the goalposts. Before it was a small circle that really understood what it meant whereas now I get family and friends messaging and calling saying well done and what a huge achievement because they respect it as something serious but also unique. There’s a lot I can mess up but also lots I can get right. I can’t just be a one trick pony that can steer straight for six minutes. It’s a huge amount of responsibility.”
We talk about the feeling of belonging. “I thought this race wasn’t for me either,” and how for him, history and inheritance give him hope.
He continued, “It’s a chance to shift the dial to allow people to believe that someone like me can do it. More simply, knowing the legacy you’re following, people who literally founded the sport, is just cool in its own right.”
He also completely dismisses any need for sensation and said: “I don’t care whether it’s remembered or not. Only 168 coxes have ever won the Boat Race. That’s a pretty exclusive club. It’s not about history or being remembered, but rather gaining entry to that club.”
For the Covid generation, our club is much smaller, but there is consolation in knowing that we still tried to achieve something bigger than ourselves. The cancellation of the race – the first time since the two World Wars – was held up mostly as a tabloid demonstration of how Covid had ripped through so many essential cultural fabrics. This outrage did indeed show the essential human right that some believe events like the Boat Race to be, and the return in recent years to much larger scale investment and coverage has been a welcome development.
When I put the question of how to defend the race to Will, he emphasised a sense of duty to this right.
He said: “I can only give a non-answer, because it’s not for me to defend. Society is the way that it is. We [Great Britain] have Henley Royal, the Grand National, Wimbledon, the Boat Race – these things capture the attention of spectators but they are testament to the fact that there is value in continuity of sporting excellence. It’s a cultural event and a long standing part of our sporting history. For some reason people do care about it, and whether we like it or not, we have a responsibility to live up to that sporting excellence.”
There might not be sensationalists writing Homerian epics much anymore, but as Matthew Pinsent has testified, “It’s an amazing experience even if you lose.” We have to feel relieved that there are people still searching for that feeling that cannot be written down.
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