7 April 2025

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch watches crews padding between meals.

The Boat Race crews, coaches and support staff are currently into Tideway Week. Previously, I have written of this period:

During the so-called Tideway Week, the seven or more days before Boat Race Day, the crews are living in or near Putney and go out on the river twice a day for light paddling and practice starts, their hard training now behind them. On the plus side, the water work is physically undemanding and the land work is the ever popular eating and sleeping. On the minus side, it could be a time when negative thoughts intrude.

Most of us can only speculate what the time span of Tideway Week feels like for those crews waiting for Boat Race Day to dawn in the culmination of nine months of ridiculously hard work for one long, hard, painful race that can only be won or lost.

The Boat Race Company and Row360 have released a four-part documentary covering the crews preparing for Sunday’s races:

Episode1: All Change

Episode 2: What It Takes

Episode 3: The Reason Why

Episode 4 will be released on 9th April also on the Boat Race YouTube Channel.

Of all the articles in the 2025 Programme, perhaps HTBS Types will be most interested in the piece by the well-informed Tom Ransley on pages 36 to 39 titled, Will Cambridge Continue Unabated?

In the women’s race Ransley notes Cambridge’s seven successive victories and holds that an Oxford win will not be easy:

Cambridge are in the ascendancy and have momentum. They showed early promise in their first fixtures before getting trounced by an Olympic-laden Leander crew in early March. That said, racing full-time elite athletes was always going to be a stretch. Cambridge bounced back and finished third at the Women’s Head of the River…  

Racing over the full Head of the River course, Cambridge’s third place was only nine seconds behind the winning Leander crew and less than a second behind second placed Thames. I will commit myself a little more than Tom Ransley has done and say that, while it is theoretically possible that Oxford could have come closer to Leander than Cambridge did had they raced the Head, if I was gambling on the Women’s Boat Race result my money would be on the lighter shade of blue.

As to the men’s race, won by Cambridge in five of the last six encounters, Ransley writes:

Statistical quirk or superior scouting? Oxford’s men seem to have the upper hand when it comes to post-Olympic Boat Races. They’ve won the last five. The last post-Olympic Cambridge triumph was in 2001…

While noting that Oxford President Tom Mackintosh has zero Boat Race experience, Ransley believes that the Olympic Champion is a huge asset for Oxford… Racing boats is what Mackintosh does best. Ransley also lists another of Oxford’s Olympic medalists, Nick Rusher, and a European silver medalist, Nicholas Kohl. He concludes that, Even without these star names, Oxford’s line up is littered with talent…

As for Cambridge having a less obviously star studded line up, Ransley reminds us that, Coach Baker has a habit of pulling off the unthinkable. Writing his President’s “Final Thoughts” in this year’s Boat Race programme, CUBC’s Luca Ferraro began, Cambridge University Boat Club has over the past few years made a habit of building crews greater than the sum of their parts. Indeed, you only have to go back to last year’s race when Oxford started as the favourites but Cambridge finished as the winners.

Ransley continues:

The fact that (Cambridge men’s reserve crew) Goldie is filled with (four) returning Blues is another indication that the Blue Boat will be razor sharp… Baker’s boys… have a total belief in the programme and an uncanny confidence to race, and race hard.

It will be a race for the ages. Oxford ought to be on-paper favourites, but you can never write off Cambridge.

Perhaps an official Boat Race publication cannot commit himself – but I can: on paper Oxford, on water Cambridge.