Oars-de-combat
FRANK KEATING
‘Are you ready ... ’ The winds skim and frisk like a well-thrown flat pebble across the chop and chill of the mucky water. So do two slim, sleek boats carrying 16 broad and beefy men. Ships, towers, domes rip by ... temples, wharves, jetties, tower blocks, bandstands, gullies; the Middlesex wall, the Surrey station, Harrods depository, Craven Cottage, the Riverside theatre; bikes on the towpath, daffs on the banks, pubs to the left of you, pubs to the right ... and ‘hurrah! hurrah!’ from Hammersmith Bridge.
Boat Race day tomorrow, so truly spring has sprung at last. Did I say 16 hulking heman hearties, each in a boat for eight? Each man heaving, hurting, symmetrically straining to turn perfect harmony into uncatchable speed? They call it an eight but, in fact, there are nine bodies in a boat. In their headlong propulsion backwards, these bulked-up eightsome reelers cannot remotely see where they are going. The tiny tot in the ninth seat can: he or she is lord of this dance, master, commander, puppeteer who, literally, pulls the strings of the whole heady enterprise. The cox is producer, director, choreographer, navigator, pilot, theodolite and sextant expert, chivvier, cheerleader, bully, nanny, nursemaid. But the wee sprite gets a mention in the public prints next morning only if he or she, you might say, ‘cox it up’. And whatever, win or lose, the big burly bods will ceremoniously throw him or her into the river at the end.
‘Are you ready? Go!’ is the timeless command from the starter on the stake boat. Any dolt can start on the order ‘Go!’ so the first thing any promising cox must learn is to start on the word ‘Are’. In Christopher Dodd’s classic history The Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race (1983), he elaborated on the tricks of these exhorting midget maestros:
Always point the shell the way you wish it to point; never give an opponent the advantage of position if you can possibly avoid it; have the measure of your own men as well as the course; be aware who can take insults and who cannot; do not be averse to speaking just loud enough for the opponent crew to hear if you want them to; know how to wind up your crew and also wind them down, and sometimes wind some up and some down simultaneously.
It would be no surprise tomorrow if the umpire threw out a crew and simply abandoned the race, particularly at the start, for such has been the increasingly aggressive venom in recent races of the two flyweight champions with the steering halyards in their tiny, frozen hands. Oars-decombat ain’t in it. A cox has to be intrepid, sure, and savagely vicious with it; any year now, I fancy, one or other Blueboat cox is going to lose it completely, shout ‘Oh, rowlocks!’ and simply ram the rival boat amidships. Which would remind old-timers of 1978 when, in choppy seas, poor Cambridge sank midstream and, as they gurgled into the deep, television commentator Jim Railton, with daintily prim olde-tyme BBC circumlocution, immortally set the nation in a roar by describing the unfortunate (but to those warm and dry at home hilarious) waterlogging as ‘leading to a dolphin effect which could yet cause a possible drowning situation’.
The Boat Race is now ITV’s, of course. Watch closely tomorrow. The two jaunty little jockeys will rule the waves, knowing when to zig and when to zag — and when, in extremis, to abandon ship.
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