“You think that makes you tough?!” screamed my rowing coach, his ire directed at a teammate who had dared to stop rowing while vomiting out of the boat in the middle of another brutal training session. “Bullshit!”
The coach shoved his fingers down his own throat, and vomited over the side of his launch. “See?! Nothing special. Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself!” My teammate silently wiped his mouth, and practice resumed.
I don’t know the specifics of the Varsity rowers’ training programmes, but I can guarantee they will have called for sacrifice, sweat, and pain beyond the grasp of nearly any other athletes.
They will have trained on average six hours per day, six days per week, for most of the past year. Some sessions will have been anaerobic – high-intensity bursts where pain sears through the entire body, causing the edges of one’s vision to go blurry and occasionally loss of consciousness. The risk from these sessions was reflected in the precautionary measure of a defibrillator in my university’s boathouse. Other sessions will have been aerobic – the long, lung-busting grinds that might leave the athletes temporarily unable to walk afterwards. Every stroke, every practice, both squads’ single motivation would have been the Boat Race.
Thankfully, brave Trenton Oldfield swam into the path of the two Blue boats, striking a blow to the heart of Big Brother and ending “the tyranny of the elites”.
But wait – what’s that you say? The misguided act of the privately-educated LSE graduate actually did nothing of the sort? Alas – perhaps it was always going to be difficult to achieve a goal so poorly defined. In a rambling, 2000-word blog entry, Oldfield offers nothing beyond the tired and vague criticism of all things “corporate” and “elitist”, and scorn for anyone who might be seen as complicit. There is nothing targeted or thought-out, and no demands or proposals are made – beyond a suggested “return to surprise tactics”.
Sadly, Oldfield could not have chosen a less fitting sport and event at which to make his “stand”. The Boat Race is a celebration of amateurism, tradition, and friendly rivalry. Like ‘The Game’, the annual American Football match between Harvard and Yale, the Boat Race attracts a broad international audience, many of whom have no personal connection to either university. There is clearly huge public interest in the event, as evidenced by a large television audience and crowd turnout.
Attempting to tie rowing to corporations is simply nonsensical. Nobody goes into rowing for the money. None of the athletes in the Boat Race will ever make a profitable career from rowing. While the desire to continue rowing and perhaps to participate in the Boat Race may have helped inspire some of the competitors to pursue graduate degrees, all of them will pursue other ‘real jobs’ when their time at university is finished. In rowing there is no glamour, little glory, and certainly no ‘selling out’.
Furthermore, rowing is without question the ultimate egalitarian sport. To be successful, a crew must be perfectly synchronised, with every member in rhythm. No one rower can guarantee a boat will go fast. There are no stars. All of the athletes in the Boat Race crews earned their places through pure hard work. There is no off-season in rowing. There are competitions all year round, and many athletes will have begun aiming for this year’s Boat Race the day after last year’s one. Rowing may be an uncommon sport, but this hardly makes it elitist: multiple competitors in this year’s Boat Race began rowing when they came to Oxford or Cambridge, just like countless rowers every year at Durham, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, or any other university.
Moreover, rowers are well known for willingly putting themselves through notoriously demanding training sessions, often at unsociable hours, and often in uncomfortable conditions. But why? This is an understandable question, especially given the often painful training described above.
What makes all the training worth it is race day, or more specifically, crossing the finish line. Like final exams or a dissertation, the joy of rowing at a Varsity level lies less in the present experience, and more in reflecting on an accomplishment after the fact. The satisfaction lies in knowing that on the day, in that one snapshot, the final result – whether academic or athletic – was as close to its potential as possible. As in many sports, the long-term efforts are aimed at producing the highest possible standard of performance at a single point of reckoning. All the training is done with an ultimate moment of evaluation in mind; removing this moment of appraisal effectively removes the very point of the exercise.
For many in the Boat Race those 18 minutes would have been the pinnacle of their athletic careers. Even before the re-start and snapped oar that saw Cambridge cross the finish line unopposed, Oldfield’s swim ensured that any result would be hollow: the winner would be forever burdened with an asterisk, the loser would lament what might have been.
Predictably, the heartfelt messages posted on Twitter by OUBC President Karl Hudspith and crewmate William Zeng received some of the usual ‘anti-Oxbridge’ snarkiness in response, but to indiscriminately wish ill on ‘Oxbridge’ as institutions is merely to repeat Oldfield’s mistake of thinking that the institutions can be divorced from the individuals representing them. Far from being a class warrior in support of some great cause, Oldfield is simply an individual who decided that since he didn’t like the game being played, no one could play.
In his paranoid manifesto, Oldfield compares himself to Emily Davison, the suffragette who threw herself under the King’s horse at Epsom Derby in 1913. Save for that they both interrupted sporting events, the self-aggrandising comparison is inane and laughable: whereas Davison was part of a broader movement with a targeted demand, Oldfield represents only himself.
Oldfield’s only legacy will be undeserved headlines for himself and tighter security at future Boat Races. The thin mask of his avowed greater purpose was quickly washed away in the Thames: what Oldfield has shown is no more than naked selfishness. He has done no harm to any of the targets in his paranoid diatribe; rather, he destroyed the dream of seventeen men and one woman who had worked unimaginably hard to earn their moment of fame.
Kevin Smith has rowed for Lincoln College, Oxford, Princeton University, and the British Columbia Senior Lightweight Team
