The Boat Race is an elitist relic – and Channel 4 knows it ...Middle East

It’s not easy to revamp an event that has been running for nearly 200 years.

Much has changed about the Boat Race since Charles Merivale challenged his old chum from Harrow School to a rowing race during the Easter holidays of 1829, but some things have not: it’s still Oxford against Cambridge, and it’s still the poshest event in the sporting calendar.

Boat Race organisers like to lean into that prestige, not least because it has helped garner a multi-year Chanel sponsorship that one conservative estimate valued at £5m.

But it did cost them placement on the BBC, with reports suggesting that the new director of BBC Sport Alex Kay-Jelski showed little interest in renewing the TV rights deal of a race first shown in 1938, and virtually always on the national broadcaster. Channel 4 will air Saturday’s renewal instead.

One report said that Kay-Jelski’s lack of passion for the Boat Race stemmed from his belief that it is “elitist”, an accusation regularly thrown around at this time of year. Of course, top-level sporting events are by their nature elite – well, maybe not Tottenham home games – but elitism is another thing entirely.

‘Let’s not beat around the bush – it is elitist’

Oxford and Cambridge universities, and Boat Race chiefs, continually cry “meritocracy”, but if you can afford to send your child to private school then they do have a better chance of getting in: you can argue about the reasons why, but the numbers don’t lie.

And there isn’t much rowing done in state schools, even if the sport is desperately trying to offer more opportunities for people to take it up: the Youth Boat Race offers students at local state schools the chance to compete on the Thames as part of the famous weekend.

But invariably it is the boathouses of schools like Eton, Radley, St Paul’s or Hampton that produce the top rowers. Combine that with a naming rights sponsorship deal that promotes a watch that costs £6,000 at its cheapest (you can pay £124,000 for a J12…) and it’s hard to escape the criticism.

“Let’s not beat around the bush. It is elitist,” says Ade Adepitan, a Paralympic medallist and Channel 4 presenter who will help lead the coverage.

Adepitan was born in Nigeria, where he contracted polio as an infant that left him requiring a wheelchair for life. He is a trailblazer in UK broadcasting as one of the first people with a physical disability to present on mainstream television. He says to me he “might as well have been an alien” when rolling into production meetings with early 1990s TV executives. The industry has changed since but the Boat Race feels like another frontier.

“It can feel really impenetrable, and it can feel quite bizarre as well, and we have to break through that look,” he adds.

“And the way we change that is to make things more accessible and more open and make it feel like it’s a tradition that we all build, that’s a part of all of us who are British or who see themselves as British.

“I want to try and make other people see that if someone from my background, a cocky East Londoner who went to primary school in Stratford, who didn’t go to university, could be part of the presenting team on one of the country’s most prestigious and biggest traditions, anyone can do that. And the only way I can do that is by being me.”

A five-year plan to broaden the Boat Race

It’s hard to imagine the BBC putting Adepitan front and centre of their Boat Race coverage, so perhaps the switch to Channel 4 is the beginning of a change.

“This is a five-year partnership between us and the Boat Race, and I would be hoping that year five looks quite different from year one,” says Pete Andrews, head of sport at Channel 4.

“We are a public service broadcaster, so we are supposed to make television for everyone. We want to broaden it and we want everyone to watch it.”

Adding some “Channel 4-ness” to the coverage is a stated aim, but there is also an existing audience. The BBC said the Boat Race no longer represented a good return on investment, but Andrews says it is still “really popular and does really good audiences”. Evolution not revolution. The Boat Race faithful are not ready for a shake-up.

Neither is Boat Race chair Siobhan Cassidy, who insists “we’re already an event that is able to attract a really wide audience and engage with different people”.

It’s true. Some years, even Eton and Radley’s best rowers can’t get into “The Big Boat” because Olympians from all over the world, particularly in the year after the Games, decide to do a post-graduate degree and tick the Boat Race off their bucket list.

At that point, is this even a university challenge, or some kind of fantasy exhibition race?

Time to let other universities in

I make the same joke about the Boat Race every year, that I am amazed to see Oxford and Cambridge in the final again. Sometimes, they are the best two crews in the country, but not always or even often. Would the Boat Race lose any of the aspirational fairy dust Cassidy insists it produces if it were Durham vs Edinburgh? Or Newcastle vs Bristol? Surely not.

Change is not a foreign concept to the Boat Race. Next year we will celebrate 100 years since the inception of the women’s race – although it is only just over a decade that they have been allowed to race on the same course as the men, and they were well received when they arrived.

“We were almost pleasantly surprised on the other side of things, of how many people were like, ‘At last, why hasn’t this happened before?’,” says Erin Kennedy, who was the Oxford cox when it was finally confirmed the women’s race would be moved to London.

“We were ready for the pushback and the debate. But actually the more overwhelming feeling was how welcome and supported it was by so many members of the rowing community, but also sports advocates in general.”

Rowing is a great leveller. No one picking a crew cares where you went to school, or the colour of your skin. They care about your 2km time, the smoothness of your stroke and your ability to perform under pressure.

They don’t even care if you got into Oxbridge or not. Maybe the Boat Race shouldn’t either.

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