Clare Balding wondered if the prerace hullabaloo would hurt the Oxford and Cambridge crews as they fine-tuned their preparations for their big day, but her guest George Nash demonstrated why he’s a three-time world champion and Olympic gold medallist and the rest of us aren’t. “A thing like a second World War unexploded bomb,” he said, “can be just the ticket to calm you down and put a smile on your face.”
So while most of us might view an unexploded bomb near the starting line of the Boat Race, on the northern shore of the River Thames near Putney Bridge, as something to fret about if we were going to be pulling like a dog in close proximity to it, George was able to see it as a positive. That’s the mindset of a winner: he looks at a potential life-threatening situation and turns it into a plus.
Mind you, in her first year as the races’ director, Michelle Dite wasn’t quite as tickled pink – “This wasn’t in my job description,” she told Clare – but it was with some relief that she had received the go-ahead from the police. The BBC was grateful too, because, outside the crown jewels, the Boat Race is one of the few live sporting events it still has.
Nowadays, of course, the broadcaster gives the men’s and women’s races equalish billing, after coverage that in bygone years amounted to “Cambridge/Oxford ladies won this morning – well done, ladies!”
There are still some teething problems to this gender-equality business, like the moment Clare told us that “the women’s Boat Race is just four or five minutes away, and it’s about an hour and five minutes to the Boat Race”, a comment that would have had us igniting our brassieres outside the Beeb’s HQ if John Inverdale had said it. But progress is rarely speedy.
With the Irish Olympian Claire Lambe rowing for Cambridge we had an emotional involvement in the race, but it didn’t last very long, Oxford catching a crab at the start to leave their vessel looking as if it was (wo)manned by drunken sailors, the result being a Cambridge procession towards victory.
It was a calamity for Oxford. Two of their crew were brave enough to speak to the BBC afterwards, and to sound heroically philosophical. “The start didn’t go as we planned,” Harriet Austin said. “We just had a minor upset at the start,” Eleanor Shearer added. But you sensed they wanted to feed the culprit to the crabs of the Thames.
Andrew Cotter’s heart went out to them. “You never really see another sporting event so starkly highlighting the difference between winning and losing, because second place in the Boat Race is nothing at all,” he said. And which of us doesn’t remember Mayo celebrating coming second in the All-Ireland championship last year? Or Jordan Spieth whooping it up after finishing runner-up to Danny Willett in Augusta 12 months ago?
Clare didn’t convince us, either, when she paid tribute to both crews by telling us that “these are full-time students. They work all day long.” And she said it with a straight face. But at least she dispelled all that silliness about the elitism of the Boat Race when she revealed that the Cambridge cox – a boy! – “is a classically trained singer who does vocal warm-ups before he starts coxing”.
It was 1-1, though, by the time the day was done, Oxford triumphing in the boys' race. "The day that started with a bomb scare has ended with an explosion of dark blue," Clare said after the 2016 winner of Strictly Come Dancing presented the dark blues, in their Lycra shorts and wellies, with their prize. Never change, Boat Race, never change.
The scene was a little different in Clones, not a pair of Lycra shorts in sight when the light blues of Dublin once again prevailed, capitalising on Monaghan’s catching a crab after they’d gone six points up, finding clear water as the clock struck 70 minutes, and winning by three whole points in the end.
“We’ve been clunky during the league,” Jim Gavin told Mícheál Ó Domhnaill of TG4. “We’ll have to improve our performances going forward or we’ll have disappointing days ahead.”
Their rivals anticipate Dublin’s unclunky phase like they might an unexploded bomb. And not in a smile-on-the-face George Nash kind of way, either.
