Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race (Or, Go Dark Blues!)

In London yesterday, one of the biggest university-level sporting events of the year took place: namely, the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, otherwise modestly known as The Boat Race or The Race. This year was the race's 160th iteration of Oxford-Cambridge rowing rivalry, and when a friend invited me to go to London to watch the drama unfold on the Thames I said sure, why not?

After a week of hitting the books at Oxford, it was a welcome change to board the bus for a day in Londontown. We got there around lunchtime, grabbed a sandwich, and then (since the boat race didn't start until later) walked from Victoria Station to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. This is a museum I've been to several times, but we'd decided to visit for a special exhibition of paintings by Paolo Veronese, an Italian painter who lived and worked in Venice during the Renaissance. A wide range of Veronese's works were on display in the National Gallery, and we spent just over an hour wandering through and taking in the grand paintings and scenes and portraits. I only find Renaissance painting interesting for a short span of time, though (before I go into visual overload with all the cherubs and virgins and stately ladies and staged scenes), so before too long we were on our way again, taking the London underground to Hammersmith station in west London.

One of the parks near Hammersmith Bridge offered an excellent viewing point for the race, it being along one of the curves in the Thames, and had set up some food and drink stalls and a giant jumbotron screen to show the BBC broadcast of the race. We'd grabbed some afternoon picnic fare on the way (bread, cheese, hummus, fruit, and of course Pimm's), and even though the skies were stormy and gray, in good British style, we settled in on a bench and munched and people-watched. One of the most pressing questions of the day, of course, was "Which blue are you?", since Oxford and Cambridge, rather confusingly, both compete under the color blue. Oxford's teams are the Dark Blues, and Cambridge's the Light Blues (why they couldn't just have chosen two different colors back in the day, such as blue and red or blue and green, is beyond me). People milled around wearing dark blue, or light blue, or Oxford/Cambridge scarves, or other charmingly British outfits such as suits or tweed coats or boat jackets, and the energy in the place was palpable. Perhaps not as palpable as it would have been at a good old-fashioned American tailgate, but hey -- this is England we are talking about.

The buzz increased as the BBC broadcast announced that the Oxford and Cambridge boats were lining up at their starting point down the Thames, and my friends and I found a bench to stand on to peer over the sea of heads along the river to try and glimpse the rowers as they rowed past. It took about five minutes for them to come into view at our bend in the river, but finally there they were, Oxford with a significant lead over Cambridge. (It turns out the two boats had collided early in the race, which I guess often happens in The Race, which cost Cambridge -- but anyway Oxford had three Olympic rowers on its squad, so no excuses.) We cheered and watched the boats go by, with a pretty amusingly large flotilla of news broadcast boats following behind them, and then zipped over to the jumbotron to watch the rest of the race broadcast. Oxford wound up winning by a huge margin, the largest since 1973, so there you go Cambridge -- the dark blues take it! This makes for 81 total victories for Cambridge and 78 total for Oxford, so let the longstanding rivalry continue.

Our day wrapped up with dinner at a pub and then a bus ride back to Oxford, where I'm currently preparing for a week of library-hopping. With characteristically glum and gray skies outside, of course.