3 April 2023

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch’s visual impressions of Boat Race Day 2023.

More than a week after The Big Day, I do not have to preface my remarks with a “spoiler alert” warning that I am going to reveal that Cambridge won all four races on 26 March, the men’s and women’s Blue and reserve crew races. 

As usual, I am working on the fairly safe assumption that HTBS Types will have watched the broadcast of the day live or on catch-up and may have also read some reports on the day such as those from Tom Ransley on both the men’s and women’s race. There were also non-paywall online reports from Ben Bloom in The Guardian, Rachel Steinberg in the Independent and Jim White in The Telegraph. None of the latter three were exactly in-depth race reports but perhaps you get what you don’t pay for. 

Also as usual, I am not going to produce a lot of text on what happened in the day’s races but am instead just going to give visual impressions of Boat Race Day 2023 through my pictures. I was allocated a place in the media launch following the women’s race so my three posts will cover the start at Putney, the women’s race in its entirety and the men’s race at the end, and will conclude with the emotional scenes involving the competitors back on dry land at the finish at Mortlake.  

It was particularly appropriate that many Cornish Gigs took part in the traditional boat row past (such as the one pictured above from the London Cornish Pilot Gig Club) as the Oxford boat used in the first Boat Race (held in Henley in 1829) owed most of its design and method of construction to the pilot gigs of Cornwall. According to “Jackson’s Oxford Journal” of 1829, the Cambridge boat was “far inferior in the water, dipping to the oar whilst (Oxford’s) rose to every stroke in fine style…”

The Kents have been Boat Race finish judges since 1928 when CW “Bill” Kent (OUBC 1891) took on the role, then only the fifth man to do this since amateurs took over from professionals in 1878. In 1952, Bill Kent was succeeded by his son, John “Jack” de R Kent (OUBC 1932). Between 1968 and 1998 Jack’s son, John F Kent, did the job and in 1999 he was succeeded by his nephew, BDJ (Ben) Kent (Isis 1987). Ben’s eldest son, Josh, began as the finish flagman in 2021. He won the Fawley at Henley in 2013 and was in the silver medal winning GB U23 Coxed Four at the World U23 Championships in 2017. Whether Josh succeeds his father as the fifth Kent to be a Boat Race finish judge at some point in the future would ultimately be up to the Boat Race Umpires’ Panel.

The 1987 Boat Race is dead but will not lie down – as the last 30 plus years show.

1989: True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny by Oxford Coach, Dan Topolski.

1991: The Yanks at Oxford: The 1987 Boat Race Controversy by Alison Gill.

1996: True Blue, a feature film that was released in the US in 2004 as Miracle at Oxford.

2012: Macdonald talks to the Daily Mail. 

2023: “Mutineer” Chris Clark talks to Junior Rowing News.

I suspect that the truth about the events leading up to the 1987 Boat Race is rather like the Schleswig–Holstein question, a complex set of diplomatic and other issues arising in the 19th century from the relations of the two eponymous European duchies. Lord Palmerston said of it, “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated that only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who went mad. I am the third and I have forgotten.”

Tomorrow: Part II, On The Water.