I Am A Polar Bear

I enjoy the Boat Race. There. I said it.

I’m not a fan of sports – not of watching it, anyway. I’m still not accustomed to the idea that I myself could be a participant in sports but archery & fencing are both in the Olympics and therefore sports, and kayaking is indisputably a sport too. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t do any of them competitively. As for watching it, you could not pay me to sit and watch a football match and although I enjoyed the Olympics on social media over the summer, I didn’t watch any of that either.

But I have a soft spot for the Boat Race. In the last decade or so, I seemed to find myself in the living room while it was on, with half a disinterested eye on whatever was going on. One year I fell in love with Cambridge’s custom Hunter “light blue” (come on, anyone with eyes can see it’s mint green) wellies. I think it was the caver in me responding to the only other sport in existence that features unwieldy rubber boots. You used to be able to buy them (it’s not Hunter anymore, they don’t have the club logos on anymore and they’re not even light blue!), they were Boat Race official merchandise, if you wanted to show your support by wearing your favourite team’s colours but they were quite expensive and my inner caver prefers the thick semi-industrial variety of welly over the decorative boot if you’re planning to drop some serious money on them. Will those Hunters still be fit to wear in 21 years? My Dunlops are, even after years of abuse in caves!

So, yeah, it started with wellies and now I have the Boat Race in my calendar as my one sporting event of the year. It’s not as if I am, or ever was, Oxbridge material. I had a friend when I was twelve who went to Cambridge and another friend who either applied there or turned down a place there or maybe even just went to an open day there and so Cambridge is my blue of choice. Besides, Cambridge turns out spies and Oxford turns out appalling politicians – admittedly, among other perfectly pleasant, normal folk, like a delightful ex-Young Leader of mine who did some kind of bioscience – so my inner eight-year-old with her Funfax Spy File was always going to end up a Cambridge supporter.

As a kayaker, I suppose there are similarities between kayaking and rowing – both use a blade on a stick to propel yourself through the water. I will probably never understand why rowing isn’t considered a paddlesport. On the other hand, I’ve tried rowing and I’m not a fan. My version is the kind where you hire a heavy wooden Swallows & Amazons-style boat and go off to “mess about on the river”, just enjoying being out in the sun. We did it – with the aforementioned suspected-Cambridge-rejector – on A Levels results day, just enjoying being free of exams and celebrating getting accepted by whatever institution we were hoping for, none of them Oxbridge. I’ve never tried the racing kind and almost certainly never will.

Every year, you see people deriding the Boat Race as “elitist”, “privileged”, “niche” etc. It’s all of those things. Of course it is. The average person isn’t getting into Oxbridge in the first place. Many of the Blues have been rowing long enough, having started as children, to already be celebrated professional rowers with championships and medals under their belt by university age. There are Olympians on those boats! Average people are not rowing competitively by their teens. Even bog-standard university clubs have subscriptions and memberships and joining fees and I would bet that membership of those two boat clubs is expensive (although I can’t find any mention of cost on CUBC’s website). The matching outfits seen yesterday, including the women’s adorable matching scrunchies and pearl necklaces and the absurd stripy blazers, are almost certainly paid for by sponsors rather than the rowers themselves so we’ll let that go as an expense. But all the same, you know that no one in those boat clubs are the state school kids done good and if they are, they’re not the ones who make it to the televised races.

But why does anyone care? No one calls football elitist, even though your average Premier League footballer gets paid more in a month than the average fan does in a lifetime. You want to complain about rich people doing sport? At least when an Oxbridge rower retires, they’ve got an elite degree and a second career ready to go and can form a sentence that doesn’t have to contain the words “at the end of the day”. I don’t deny that footballers train hard but Boat Race participants are training just as hard and doing their degree work and they’re not being paid £1m a day for it. And, not that I watch football, but have you ever seen a rower rolling around wailing and pretending to be injured to avoid rowing?

I know football has this weird equality thing whereby the top players are pampered brats above the law with more money than some small countries but it’s also a game anyone can play if they’ve got something vaguely spherical to kick and a couple of jumpers to mark the goals. There’s no easy way in to rowing for a couple of bored kids from a deprived background. Those same kids aren’t likely to make it as actors either, but no one refuses to watch TV on the grounds that the people on the screen are too elite. In fact, those kids probably won’t become professional footballers either. No one’s avidly watching a few neighbour kids out of a love of the game, they’re only interested in the elite. So why do people turn into such snobs over the Boat Race?

Because of two things, I reckon. We, as a nation, don’t like clever people. We instinctively resent the existence of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, even if we don’t know why. They talk about things we don’t understand, like catching crabs and stroke seats and ergs and male coxes on female teams and we don’t like feeling like we’re being excluded from whatever someone else is talking about.

The second is that, despite that, we know that Oxbridge has a chronic case of nepotism and we don’t like corruption either. Therefore we dislike their students when they occasionally come to our attention, because we’re suspicious of them, jealous of them, know they don’t deserve to be where they are or a combination of all three. In turn, we think it makes us look like we’ve cracked the code to point out that elite university rowing is… well, elitist. Well done, Sandra. Now do some reading on that football team you like.

Sport is inherently elitist. You want to watch the best of the best competing, not me and my state school classmates vs the High down the road, none of us having ever been in a boat before. Every four years, some bright spark suggests showing ordinary people competing in Olympic sports and although that would be funny for a couple of minutes, you’d soon get bored with it and want the people who know what they’re doing to reappear.

The other argument is that “it’s the same two teams making the final every year”. They’re being facetious but let’s address it anyway. This is a two-hundred-year-old grudge match reenacted every year that’s escaped the confines of the two rival universities at the centre of it and caught the attention of the wider world. You want to get all the universities in on it and do an annual league? That’s something completely different, but go for it. I’d watch that. At least, I would for the first couple of races and then I’d reach the point of “rowing again? I only watched it on Wednesday. And what do you mean, I have to pick a favourite team and it’s not allowed to be the one that’s going to win?”. That’s part of the fun of the Boat Race, that I have to maintain my interest for less than an hour and a half a year. Anyway, if there are other universities with “better” rowing teams, that implies this competition already exists, you just need to get it on the telly. Go for it.

Let’s be a little bit serious. There are good things coming out of the Boat Race for the general public too. In the midst of the red-trousered hoorays getting drunk on the riverbank and yelling for their favourite boat, the Boat Race is highlighting some other, quite important stuff and putting it in front of a lot of eyes. This year it’s being sponsored by the British Heart Foundation’s CPR app and while it doesn’t replace proper qualified first aid training, there’s no downside to more people learning the basics of lifesaving first aid or having the benefits of learning it pointed out to them. Naturally, the subject of water quality and pollution comes up, something we can all be annoyed about in the abstract, more over corporate greed than any real interest in what’s floating down our rivers but when it directly affects the Boat Race, it brings it to a lot of people’s attention which in turn puts more pressure on the water companies and the politicians to do something about it. And the Boat Race also has initiatives in local schools to bring rowing to ordinary kids, kids from what my mum calls “some of the roughest schools in London” (not entirely convinced about that description myself – but at the very least, they’re seven state schools rather than private or public schools) who race the very same course as the real Boat Race. Will any of them have the opportunity to carry on after they leave those schools? Probably not. But they’re helping bring the sport out of the realm of the rich and into the realm of ordinary kids, and that’s always a good thing.

Is this relevant to prattle about on my travel blog? I think so. Adventure is one of my “content pillars” and that includes watersports. I like watersports. Sometimes I even like watching it. I did kayaking in London the other day. Today we’ve changed the shape of the paddle slightly and elongated the boat and put a few extra people in it and suddenly it’s rowing in London. And if I get the chance to try it for myself, I’ll definitely be writing about it. CUBC, invite me up for a taster session, ok?