18 March 2023

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch writes post haste.

I do not know if the doyen of blue-collar arena-rock, Jon Bon Jovi, has ever rowed the Thames Championship Course between Mortlake and Putney (or vice versa) but stranger things have happened. For example, Kris Kristofferson is one of the few inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame who was also an Oxford Rhodes Scholar and a Boxing Blue. 

Whatever Mr Jovi’s sporting achievements, there are few who have not raced the gruelling 6,779 metre course that would not relate to his lyrics, Woah, we’re half way there, Woah, livin’ on a prayer. Knowing that you are past half-way is always a great incentive to draw on physical and psychological reserves in the battle to stay strong to the finish. The problem has always been, where is the half-way point between P and M (or M and P)?

Until recently, the conventional wisdom has always been that you were about “half way there” when you were at the blue windows (sometimes inexplicably called “the blue doors”) on the gable end of the Durham Wharf studio just downstream of Chiswick Eyot that once belonged to the artist, Julian Trevelyan. In 2014, I wrote about the famous parties that Trevelyan once held for the arty set at his studio every Boat Race Day. One guest in the 1950s was fellow artist Feliks Topolski who brought along his young son, Daniel, giving the boy his first view of the event that would later play a very large part in his life.

However, on 13 March, a more precise marker came into being when St Paul’s School unveiled “The St Paul’s Post”, a half-ton, 4.25-metre tall post made of green English oak painted in the black and white livery of the school, standing in St Paul’s grounds on a 3,389.5-metre point between start and finish.

A press release from the school says:

The marker’s location was determined by taking a normal to the tangent of the racing line (assumed to be the centre of the Fairway…) at the halfway point and extending it to the Surrey bank and then into the St Paul’s site.

Unlike most of his contemporaries in top-level sculling, in his racing days Alan Campbell was not just obsessed with the 2,000-metre, multi lane, still water course. Like the scullers of old, he was also passionate about watermanship on a living river. He told me:

The Tideway is a unique place and the Championship Course requires Champions in order to win it. Champions go beyond just having the physiological, the psychological and the technical attributes needed… they also need to have Character. This is a course that not only requires (character) it also demands it… My predecessors who had been single scullers at the Olympics before me had all been Champions on the Tideway… which was very inspiring. 

With Boat Race Day, 26 March, fast approaching, this is an appropriate time to look more closely at the real star of the show, the Championship Course. The 2019 Boat Race Programme gave a nice summary of the intricacies of the 4 1/4 miles and I reproduce it here in bold illustrated with pictures from my archive.

The course for the Boat Race comprises four bends; two at the start and finish in favour of the Middlesex or north bank station, and two in the middle favouring the Surrey or south bank station. The start of the race is marked by the University Stone, set in the pavement a few hundred yards upstream from Putney Bridge. 

For the first quarter of a mile, the course is quite straight. Then begins the first Middlesex bend, said to be worth a third of a length advantage to the crew drawn on that station. The bend is almost three-quarters of a mile long and takes the crews up towards the Mile Post, the first of the classic race timing points.

For the next two miles, the bend in the river favours the crew drawn on Surrey and is said to be worth about one length to the inside crew. Near the apex of the Surrey Bend is Hammersmith Bridge. Shortly after the two-mile point, the Race arrives at Chiswick Reach, heralded by the narrow island, Chiswick Eyot, near the Middlesex bank.

At the end of Chiswick Reach is the third timing station, Chiswick Steps. The second Surrey bend then begins to even out as the crews approach the three-mile mark. Here is the point known as the Crossing where the best rowing line runs directly across the middle of the river, and this is where the boats lose the shelter of the shore and become vulnerable to any prevailing south-westerly wind. 

Now begins the final bend in favour of the crew on Middlesex, and when the Race passes under Barnes Railway Bridge there is barely three-quarters of a mile to go. 

The finish line at Mortlake is just a few yards downstream from Chiswick Bridge, marked by a second University Stone.

Like rowing itself, properly steering the Championship Course is “simple but not easy.”