The Boat Race

This coming Sunday will be the 155th Boat Race. If you find yourself asking, "Which boat race?" please click here. The rest of you know that it is simply the Boat Race, the competition between Oxford and Cambridge, first held in 1829 and annually since 1856 (with the exception of the World Wars), down four and a quarter miles of the River Thames, from the Putney Bridge to the Chiswick Bridge. Cambridge has won 79 of the races, Oxford 74, with one declared a dead heat.

This past weekend the Financial Times had an excellent article on Rebecca Dowbiggin, the Cambridge coxswain. This year's race will be at 3:40pm (British Standard Time), so I might still be at mass while the actual race is happening, but I look forward to watching it online shortly thereafter.

To be honest, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I will, however, be wearing my Caius College tie, in honor of Silas Stafford, a native of Santa Rosa, California, who is studying for an MPhil in Geography at Gonville & Caius and will be rowing stroke for the Cambridge team. I wore that tie the day Caius won their fifth consecutive Lent Bumps, earning them the right to put a bell tower on their boat house, so maybe the tie is lucky. Then again, 1st & 3rd Trinity have won that race every year since then, so maybe it's not.

Below you'll find a video about the Trial Eights, the trial run each school conducts in December.



Special thanks to Barry Arthur Stephen Harding McCain, who gave me the Caius tie.