College Record 2014

cry of frustration at our failure to achieve perfection in an exercise: ‘It’s so simple,
Wolfson! Hands, THEN bodies! Why can’t you do it?’ For some reason I was
elected (or maybe just appointed) crew captain, apparently a meaningless title in a
boat, as the cox has authority on the river, and the coach off it, but I felt honoured.
By Autumn Fours the stern four were enough advanced to be entered as a four, a
fairly rare event then. We raced in Wolfson’s ancient wooden four ‘The Graduate’,
and little did we know that a film crew was filming scene-setting shots for the
movie ‘True Blue’, the story of the Boat Race mutiny in 1987. Our wooden boat
went well with the opening lines of the movie; so, if you watch, you can see us
lifting the boat out at the boathouse, and then ploughing down the river. I am
immortalized in my red cap at bow, leaning to the right at the finish of each stroke.
This gave us some good race experience as well, and it seemed that we were coming
together as a powerful crew. There was a sense of quiet confidence, tempered by
the knowledge that Wolfson had never got past the semis, and rumours abounded
of the big undergraduate colleges siphoning off athletic novices and sending them
to intensive rowing farms. We did not seriously think we could win, but expected
to put on a good show – until we drew Merton ‘A’ in the first round. The day
before our first race we saw them cruise past as we pulled our boat out of the water,
eight rowing Adonises balancing their boat perfectly. Oh well, we thought, there is
always the repechage.
The first race duly came, and after our frenetic start (in which Rob at 4 always
seemed to dump a gallon of water in my lap at 7), we could see we had left them
for dead already. We cruised across the line two lengths or so ahead, and the
quiet confidence returned. On Friday the next race, also against an ‘A’ crew (I’m
going to say Mansfield, but I can’t remember all the crews we raced), was another
comfortable victory, but nerve-wracking for me as my shorts got stuck in the slide
after the douche by Rob, and I had to row half-slide from about half-way down the
course. I bought some cycle shorts that evening. On Saturday we were into the
last 16, and again we raced against an ‘A’ crew, possibly Exeter. It was also one of
those miserable November days, with incessant rain. Again we won comfortably:
we seemed to have a start that just destroyed other crews; rarely did we not have
clear water by the OUBC boathouses. Our next race was against a ‘B’ crew, Jesus,
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