22 February 2025

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch on the closest thing that the Boat Race has to a form guide.

Today, the 2025 Oxford – Cambridge Boat Races are fifty days away. This period in the Boat Race season sees the races known as Fixtures. Plagiarising myself, I have previously written that:

The Boat Race Fixtures, when top British and foreign crews race potential Oxford and Cambridge Blue, reserve and lightweight crews over sections of the Putney to Mortlake course, are an important part of the Boat Race Season. They are both a selection test and a provider of key race practice, giving the experience of competing against top-class opposition and also providing opportunities for the rowers and coxes to simulate race day as much as possible. They get to know the course, can practise routines and starts, get to race on both the Surrey and the Middlesex stations and have the experience of being officially umpired. 

While the benefits of the fixtures for crews are clear, what is less obvious is that the results of the encounters are the nearest indicators of “form” that these two-horse races have. Predicting Boat Race results is particularly difficult as the crews that will meet on the big day have never raced each other before and will never race each other again (except in the winners’ dreams and the losers’ nightmares).

The Boat Race Company is live-streaming the fixtures with Cambridge on Sunday 2 March, and with Oxford on Saturday 29 March. Go to the Fixtures page on theboatrace.org to book free hospitality places at London RC and also to register for the live stream. Otherwise, go to the Boat Race YouTube Channel  before 13.40 GMT on 2 March for the Cambridge races and before 11.50 GMT on 29 March for the Oxford races.

For a view of last year’s Fixtures through a light blue lens, CUBC’s Tom Lynch has an excellent video on his equally excellent  YouTube Channel. 

The February/March Fixtures are preceded in the Boat Race calendar by the December Trial Eights. They are not contests of Light Blue v Dark Blue, they are men’s and women’s intra-university races, Oxford v Oxford and Cambridge v Cambridge, where the last sixteen rowers and last two coxswains from each squad in battle it out in theoretically matched boats, all hoping to impress the coach who has to pick their final crew. HTBS was not able to cover them this year but, despite a common misuse of the word “infamous”, Tom Ransley has produced brilliant reports on all four races for Row360.