4 April 2022
By Tim Koch
Tim Koch says, “Don’t hold the front page.”
LONDON, Sunday: Fast rowing boats from two old universities raced each other on the Thames from Putney to Mortlake yesterday. They had done this before. Some boats went faster than others. The winners were happy, the losers were sad.
As is my usual practice, I will not be producing detailed race reports for the Oxford – Cambridge Boat Races on the grounds that most HTBS Types will have watched it live or on catch up and will have read fairly immediate reports by people who are far better at that sort of thing than I.
However, once I have sorted through 700 photographs, I will be posting three pieces that hopefully capture the atmosphere and emotion of the occasion. I was lucky enough to be able to follow the men’s race in the press launch – though this did mean that I missed seeing the other races.
My three-part posting will illustrate Putney in the build up to the races, the men’s Blue Boat Race in action from start to finish, and the aftermath at Mortlake.
Media reports:
Rachel Quarrell, Jim White and Alan Tyers in The Daily Telegraph.
Luke McLaughlin in The Guardian.
George Sessions in the Independent (Register for free to read).
BBC Sport (with video clips for UK viewers).
Those in the UK can watch the BBC’s two-and-a-half hour coverage on iPlayer.
I hesitate to link to The Mail Online report. It has negligible text written by an intern but, as usual, it has a lot of excellent pictures. However, try to avoid reading any of the 400 plus comments unless you need to be up to speed on current racism, sexism and anti-transsexualism (if that is a word).
Hear The Boat Sing 
The word you are looking for at the end is “transphobia.” To be fair, I have always noticed that the comments section of ALL newspapers brings out the worst of humanity and sensible people don’t read them, unless they want to spoil their day! Not just the Daily Mail but also the Telegraph comments on the Boat Race are full of rude, classist, sexist and transphobic comments. The Telegraph moderators only act when a comment is flagged up by a subscriber, but the Daily Mail ones are not moderated at all so you would expect to find the worst ones there. The Guardian piece is moderated and a great many comments have been removed (I expect the sexist /transphobic), but dozens of rude comments remain, mainly classist as you would expect from Guardian readers (“I didn’t realise this elitist claptrap was still on”). The Indie, oddly, has only attracted a single comment!
Thank you, Teresa, I should have known that word.
Yes, reading comments sections is a depressing experience and one that should be avoided. Those who post hateful comments over their Full English Breakfast are rather like the citizens of Oceania who started the day with The Two Minute Hate. Doubleplusbad. Before the Internet, these people would have written on lavatory walls, sometimes using a medium of their own making. In some ways, little has changed.
Not only does the online Mail not moderate comments, it does not employ sub-editors. For a long time, one piece referred to Ann Frank’s Diary as “infamous”. There are two possible explanations for this. The Mail does not know the meaning of “infamous” or it has gone back to supporting Fascism as it did in the 1930s.