No grin on my boat … (cockney rhyming slang – ‘boat race’ = ‘face’, geddit?!)
It’s quite difficult to know how to begin this piece. We’re all familiar with the situation when someone taking part in a formal debate – or even just getting their turn to speak in a social conversation – begins his or her remarks with those two innocent-sounding little words “With respect, …” they’re actually intending to render unto the previous speaker(s) none at all. On the contrary, they’re about to unleash a weapon from their armoury store – e.g. a conclusive piece of evidence or a point of towering intellectual significance – which (they are quietly confident) will crush their opponent’s just-stated line of argument.
Or, as the Duke Of Wellington, born Arthur Wesley (later Wellesley), once put it when someone mentioned that he was himself (Anglo) Irish: “Being born in a stable doesn’t make you a horse”.
Now, for someone who likes to regard himself as politically-correct as the next man, I’m all too aware that in embarking upon my topic of the day I’m metaphorically stepping into a minefield, but I’m going to forge ahead anyway.
My mitigation in doing so is that my motivations are less politically-incorrect or sexist than keeping to the straight and narrow of highlighting the difference (in terms of popular interest amongst both genders) between men’s and women’s sport. I do this despite being mindful of the good intentions of those who seek to associate the latter with the former, not least in the cause of encouraging females generally to participate in sporting activities for all the well-known beneficial reasons.
Yesterday, after a relatively busy morning, by chance I discovered that it was Boat Race day and duly tuned to BBC1 at 4.00pm on which Clare Balding was anchoring the Beeb’s extensive coverage of (what I must now call) the Cancer Research UK University Boat Race from the banks of the River Thames.
It must have been five years or more since I last watched it, but things appeared to have moved on apace for this 163rd running of the event, one of those annual British staples which hopefully will continue forever and yet inevitably goes in phases during which either the Dark or Light Blues dominate the results and, for reasons which sometimes seem obscure or unfathomable, the amount of popular interest seems to wax and wane.
The Boat Race retains a status unique among Oxford and Cambridge sporting contests. In the 21st Century the exponential growth of interest in professional sport around the globe has seriously reduced the previously-central role of Oxbridge sport as an accepted stepping-stone to elite national and then international prominence.
For example, in rugby union the annual Varsity Match these days struggles to attract more than 25,000 spectators to Twickenham, causing the RFU to seriously consider whether it still warrants the privilege of being played there. And from a talented rugby player’s point of view, why should you bother any more to seek to expose your rugby prowess to the world by studying hard to get to Oxbridge after leaving school – and then take a degree there – when these days you can be ‘scouted’ by an English Premiership club at Under-16 level, taken straight into their academy and hopefully thereby not only to progress one day to the first team, but also (thanks to constant monitoring by the national selectors) to the national side via selection for England age-group honours?
I suspect that the Boat Race’s recent surge in popularity is mainly due to the public’s much greater awareness of rowing generally, thanks to the achievements of Olympic rowers like Sir Steve Redgrave, Sir Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell (to name three gentlemen) and Dame Katherine Grainger, Helen Glover and Heather Stanning (to name three ladies), but partly also because it is a genuine one-off: in any given April – and bearing in mind the random vagaries of life including the weather – the public may suddenly (with varying degrees of specific interest in what is happening out on the water) decide this year to ‘make a day-out of it’ by making their way to the River’s edge somewhere along the course.
From the comfort of my sofa yesterday the professionalism and sophistication of everything surrounding the Boat Race had clearly gone up several notches since last I partook.
The short video features played in the run-up to the contests testified as much – Cambridge have recently acquired an expensive mega-modern rowing clubhouse where both men and women base themselves to train. Both university crews were bedecked with the latest professional rowing lycra outfits and accessories and presented themselves to the world as bona fide elite modern athletes – as indeed some of their number, a fair sprinkling of them overseas graduates with rowing pedigrees all the way up to Olympic standard – already were.
Yesterday the television coverage was my main focus of interest.
The Beeb had patently decided to clear the decks and make the most of one of the few national sports events for which it holds the television rights. They must have had the best part of 100 cameras dotted along the course, primed to feature everything from the gargoyle-like faces being made by the crews as they strained to put in every effort they could in the greater cause, to innumerable river-side (both rowing and entertainment) celebrity interviews, to shots of the public sunning and enjoying themselves, and indeed anything and everything that could possibly represent the occasion in a favourable light. Also deployed were a supplementary number of B-list television presenters primed to pick up interviews and items of interest.
What could possibly go wrong?
One aspect of proceedings was that the Beeb had given itself roughly forty minutes of lead-up time to covering the main events – the women’s and then men’s boat races – (of the men’s second/reserve crews’ contest between Goldie and Isis we saw nothing).
Here, as ever with live broadcasting, the viewer gets what he or she gets and often it includes a smattering or two of ‘filling in time’. Therefore we had Clare Balding, whom I still admire greatly as a presenter/anchor despite her seeming uncanny ability to pop up on every television programme I watch, running through the personal stats of one or other of the men’s crews as they exited their mini-van upon arriving for the Race. At one point, in giving their weights and heights (e.g. “He’s 14 stone 6 pounds and 6 feet 3”) she twice in succession cocked up by saying instead the equivalent of “He’s 14 stone 6 pounds and 6 stone 3”.
The trouble when you have brought together a wide range of rowing elite greats to provide commentary, predictions and analysis, tend to arise when the fare happening out on the water is unremarkable or worse. Yesterday, sadly, this issue reached its peak with the appetizer – the women’s race.
In previewing the contest, much was made of the six months of more of sacrifices, early morning starts, dedication, juggling of academic studies with training, the injury setbacks and all the other trappings of elite sport participation which the ladies in both crews had put in. We were told that many of them were already at, or close to, greater honours at British international level. The scene was carefully set for what we were about to see – a shining example of the prowess of British rowing at its finest.
And then, a milli-second after the ‘off’, the Oxford four-stroke, American Rebecca Esselstein ‘caught a crab’ with her very first attempted stroke of her oar. The Oxford boat took less than five seconds of mayhem to sort themselves out, albeit that period is an age in the context of a rowing boat – by which time the favourites Cambridge were already three complete boat-lengths clear and the race was effectively over.
Eventually Cambridge won – in a course record time for the women’s race, albeit this was only the third time it has been held on the Thames – by a stonking 11 lengths.
The viewer on his sofa at home thus beheld the spectacle of the Beeb’s massive army of race commentators (lead man Andrew Cotter, as ever, excellent) and elite expert analysts effectively ‘filling time’ for the extended period of firstly, the nineteen minutes or so it took both crews to complete the course and then, secondly, another half hour afterwards of post-event interviews, award ceremonies and general ‘come down’.
The experience was inevitably somewhat akin to that of being an enforced ‘rubber-necker’ driving past a car accident.
It didn’t matter how much the pundits attempted to dress it up, blathering on as they did with technical rowing terms, the ‘journeys’ the crews had been on, giving constant and rather vacuous advice as to what each boat now needed to do [when all the time it was clear to this viewer that the Cambridge crew could have stopped rowing, taken out a primer stove and made themselves cups of tea and still won, such was the strength of the tide going their way], the glaring fact was that the 2017 Cancer Research UK Women’s University Boat Race had been a total and utter non-event from start to finish.
I did feel for the broadcasting presenters as they tried in vain, against all the odds, to put the best gloss they could upon what to all intents and purposes had been a complete fiasco.
I’m trying to avoid finishing with an easy sexist non-PC gag about the women’s Boat Race not having too good a run – viz. this year over before it started, last year the Cambridge boat to all intents and purposes sinking in dreadful weather conditions.
However, the fact is that yesterday the cause of women’s rowing (and women’s sport generally) was scarcely advanced as a very healthy crowd indeed along the banks of the Thames, and presumably a couple of million television viewers at home, looked on as one crew proceeded down the course at the very best (or, if you like, very worst) roughly the length of a football pitch ahead of the other.
