16 March 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch on four crews that temporarily put the power back into Battersea Power Station.

The word “iconic” is much overused but it is difficult to avoid it when talking of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race or of Battersea Power Station, the decommissioned “brick-cathedral” sited on the Thames in southwest London. When the two come together it is advisable simply to give into the inevitable and embrace the hackneyed term. 

With its origins in the 1930s, the much-loved power station building provided a stunning backdrop to the crew photographs that preceded the crew announcement. Lucy Edmunds, the Oxford women’s number “7” was absent as, earlier in the day, she had suffered a minor bicycle accident and was having a precautionary medical check.

Photo Op: Men

Photo Op: Women

The Announcement Of The Crews

For the first time in the long history of the Boat Race, the announcement of which eighteen athletes from each club would be in their Blue Boats on the big day was staged as a public event. It saw fans, families, alumni, Old Blues, members of both university boat clubs, shoppers and passers-by gather inside one of the power station’s former turbine halls to witness the crews taking the stage with commentary provided by the BBC’s current Voice of the Boat Race, Andrew Cotter. 

After crew photographs outside the Battersea complex, there was an amusingly stage managed event with each pair of rival athletes descending to the announcement stage via twin escalators, walking down the aisle between the seated guests, exchanging handshakes with their respective coaches, mounting the stage and then shaking hands with their opposite number. The men elected to be weighed at this point, the women have not taken part in this mildly undignified process since 2019.

Of the 36 named, 20 were British with the remainder coming from France, the Netherlands, Canada, the US, New Zealand, Germany and Australia. Both boat clubs started the season with just under 90 hopefuls who were willing to attempt to combine 30 hours of training a week with their studies.

The Women’s Blue Boats

The Men’s Blue Boats  

Oxford average weight: 92.23 kg / 14 st 7 lbs / 203.33 lbs.

Cambridge average weight: 91.65 kg /14 st 6 lbs / 202.05 lbs.

News of the Crews

The online British national newspaper, The Independent, has not always been a fan of the Boat Race. However, perhaps it is trying to make amends as on 13 March the paper’s Rachel Steinberg wrote a positive piece on the race using several nice quotes that Cambridge’s Luca Ferraro gave to the Press Association (PA). As befits a classics student and, he tells me, a HTBS reader, Ferraro is aware of the Boat Race’s past as well as its present. He told the PA:

Its appeal is so hard to pin down. It’s across so many different factors – the tradition, the history plays a massive part. It’s that iconic university rivalry; it’s Oxford, it’s Cambridge.

I really think that in a world where sport is so flashy – it’s so high-profile these days, there’s so much money involved – the Boat Race is still sport at its purest form.

It’s almost spartan. It’s just you and the other guys and you’ve got to go faster than them if you want to win. There’s something super primal about it.”

Ferraro won with the GB men’s eight at the U23 World Rowing Championships last summer. Previously, he raced for Team GB in the double sculls at the Coupe De La Jeunesse in 2019 and with Ollie Parish as the GB U23 pair in 2022. 

It is always nice to see young undergraduates in the Boat Race and Ferraro’s move from losing bowman to winning stroke is impressive. Further, he seems to set his own path. He attended the non-rowing Latymer School in north London (not to be confused with Latymer Upper, the rowing school in Hammersmith) and learned to scull at the unfashionable Lea Rowing Club in east London. Further, Ferraro is the first member of King’s College, Cambridge, to row in the Boat Race since 1953!

Oxford has a remarkably experienced men’s crew. The cox, Will Denegri, is an U23 Gold Medalist, Saxon Stacy is a 2022 U19 World Champion in the coxless four, Harry Glenister has four Henley medals, Leonard Jenkins won gold for GB as in the 2019 U23 men’s eight and in the senior four at the 2022 World Cup I, James Doran raced in the U23 men’s eight and won gold at the European Championships in 2021. The Dark Blue women include Annie Sharp, bronze medallist at the European Championships in the coxless four and Lucy Edmunds, a silver medalist at the 2019 U23 World Rowing Championships in the women’s eight.

Looking Back

The term “Crew Announcement” is comparatively new, before this the meeting of the crews held about three weeks before the race was called the “Weigh-in”. How much or how little fairly small weight differences are an indicator of possible performance is open to debate though it may at least give a psychological advantage to be the heaviest crew. There are stories of rowers drinking vast amounts of water before getting on the scales in order to temporarily increase their weight.

While it is sad that fewer and fewer press photographers attend the Crew Announcement, the positive side is that the crews are no longer coerced into stunts to make pictures that will interest the non-rowing public.

The 78th Women’s Boat Race begins at 14:46 on Saturday, 30th March 2024, with the 169th Men’s Boat Race an hour later.