Varsity Blues

My dad's a PE teacher, so is my sister, its the family trade. I assume this is where my interest in sport comes from. Whilst I watch a lot of sport now, its nothing compared to the interest and zeal I had in sport, any sport, when I was at school. Not only did I have a favourite football team, I had one for every league in Europe. And then there were favourite rugby teams, Union and League, prefered tennis players, County cricket sides, favourite motor racing drivers and the list goes on. However, our house was satelitte dish free and so my sporting interest revolved around what I could watch. If there was sport on one of the four (yes, four) channels I would watch it, from bowls to Touring Car racing. And so when the Boat Race came around, safe to say I was there in front of the television watching the prolonged, drawn out build-up, freakishly posh interviewees, guffawing wine quaffers, the whole lot.

The Boat Race however, was the most anti-climactic of all televisied sporting events, and I used to watch Formula One. Like any young boy I watched motor-racing in the hope of seeing a crash; I could watch cars drive around at the top of our street, but only on tv did they crash. Similarly, in the 'warm-up' to the Boat Race the BBC would always show footage of the Cambridge boat sinking in 1978, a crew of 118 man look-a-likes slowly descending into the Thames, or talk of lightning striking the camera positions before the start of the race. And so I stayed tune in the hope that well, lightning would strike twice, or someone would fall overboard, or a whale would swim up the Thames. Of course nothing even half as exciting as this ever did happen.

Instead, it was, as the name suggested, just a Boat Race, the same two teams battling it out year on year, a lengthy monotonous dirge from start to finish, overhyped by the media, watched avidly and excitedly by two exclusive supporting contingents while the rest of us looked on wondering what all the fuss was about. It is basically the Scotish Premier League on water. So with all this in mind, I was surprised to see how much media had been generated today by the news that ITV have decided not to continue televising the event. According to the Guardian 'The Boat Race is no longer protected under the government's 'crown jewels' legislation' meaning that it is not on the Government produced list of sporting events which must be televised on free-to-air channels.

The question remains, why was it ever on this list? The 'crown jewels' list exists to save sporting fixtures of national interest from pay-per-view channels, on it are, amongst others, Wimbledon, the FA Cup Finals of England and Scotland, the Rugby World Cup, the Grand National and the Rugby League Challenge Cup. All of these, are sporting competitions, with a wide array of possible winners, yes, the Boat Race is has history, but it exists as little more than an Oxbridge folly. "Oh bad luck Mungo, thought you had us this year... still, fancy another go next year?" Do we really need to see that?