The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race

It all started with two school friends. Back in 1829, two former schoolmates from Harrow ended up at opposing universities and decided to challenge each other to a rowing match on the Thames, sparking a tradition that has lasted for nearly two centuries.

The famous blue colors have a simple origin. Cambridge wears light blue and Oxford wears dark blue. Oxford chose the darker shade for the very first race because several of their crew members belonged to Christ Church College, which used dark blue as its official color.

The race course is incredibly grueling. The teams row along the Championship Course, a punishing four-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of the tidal River Thames running from Putney to Mortlake in West London.

A coin toss provides a massive strategic advantage. Before the race, a simple coin toss decides which side of the river each team gets. Winning the toss lets a team pick either the Middlesex or Surrey station, which matters hugely because of the sharp bends in the river.

The boats actually sink sometimes. The Thames can get incredibly choppy, and there have been six official sinkings in the history of the race. During a particularly stormy race in 1912, both teams sank entirely, and the event had to be rescheduled for the next day.

A near-blind judge called a famous tie. In 1877, the race was incredibly close and was declared a dead heat. Both teams were furious, especially since rumors circulated that the race judge, John Phelps, was over seventy years old and blind in one eye. This controversy led to the introduction of official finishing posts.

Women originally had to race for style points. The first women’s race took place in 1927, but the crews were not allowed to race side-by-side on the river because it was deemed unladylike. Instead, they rowed separately and were judged on their time and their aesthetic grace.

True equality took decades to achieve. It was not until 2015 that the women finally got the spotlight they deserved, racing on the exact same Championship Course on the exact same day as the men.

A famous mutiny rocked the Oxford team. In 1987, a group of elite American rowers at Oxford staged a massive walkout. They rebelled against the coach’s intense land-training methods and selection choices, creating a massive public scandal that was later turned into a movie.

Dr. House is a Boat Race alumnus. Long before he was a famous Hollywood actor, Hugh Laurie rowed for the Cambridge team in the 1980 race. He was following in the footsteps of his father, who was an Olympic gold medalist and a former Cambridge rower himself.

A rogue swimmer stopped the entire race. In 2012, a protester deliberately swam straight into the path of the speeding boats. The umpire had to completely halt the race to avoid hitting the man with the oars, resulting in a tense thirty-minute delay before they could restart.

Being heavier is a massive advantage. Statistics show that the heavier crew wins the men’s race over sixty percent of the time, which makes the official pre-race weigh-in a highly anticipated and heavily scrutinized event for both sides.

War is the only thing that stops the rowing. Since 1856, the event has been held annually without fail, with the only cancellations happening during the First World War, the Second World War, and the 2020 global health pandemic.

The umpires are always former competitors. To make sure everything is completely fair and understood, the race umpires are always Old Blues, meaning they are former rowers from the universities, and they alternate between an Oxford alumnus and a Cambridge alumnus every year.

It draws a massive global audience. Even though it is just an amateur race between two universities, the fierce historic rivalry pulls in around a quarter of a million spectators to the riverbanks and is watched by approximately fifteen million people on television worldwide.