The Boat Race

Not 'a' boat race, 'THE' boat race.

Every year, for the past 160 years, Cambridge and Oxford have a crew race. I'm not sure if the location has changed over time, but these days it takes place down the River Thames, free for all of London to see. Specifically, the race starts at Putney Bridge then heads west around some very sharp turns and ends in, um, let's say Chiswick. The main point being that it does not go through central London and conveniently starts a mile away from my house.

The race this year was on Sunday afternoon. Being free and all, about a gazillion people headed down to the river to see what they could see. I'm not sure how many of these people actually went to Oxford or Cambridge, but we were seemingly the only people not drinking vast quantities of alcohol. But this was no tailgater - the people in front of us (who had come by bike) popped a bottle of champagne.

We were in Bishop's Park, which while just down from the bridge, has a long length of river frontage and a big square in the middle where they'd set up a big screen so you could watch the race once it had disappeared from view. We got to the park about 45 minutes before 'The' race, any about 15 minutes before the 'juniors' race, which I took to mean 'the B team' race. 'The' race garnered two hours of tv time, despite being less than 15 minutes long, thus allowing us to learn all sorts of things (as did that morning's paper). For example, there were 18 people involved - 16 rowers and 2 cox people. There were just as many Americans (5) as British people (5), and there were a fair number of 2008 Olympians involved. The tallest guy was 6'9", and they tended to be around 25 and post-grads. Oxford were the favorites, and to give away the end, they did end up winning.

HOWEVER, the race was quite exciting, mainly in that Cambridge was able to take the lead, it was announced that 80% of people ahead at that point won the race, at which point Oxford roared back to take the lead (with some minor oar clashing). I assure you, times are tough for the losing side, they're just allowed to sit there and skulk while the winners get given a trophy and the winning team's cox guessed tossed into the river.

I took some pictures, but at present we are experiencing virus issues and aren't allowed to plug devices into our computers, so I fear an alarm going off if I make such an attempt...