The Xchanging Boat Race is a world renowned annual rowing race between rival crews from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. There are no prizes for second place.
The Race takes place along a 6,799m stretch of the River Thames, known as the Championship Course, which begins in Putney and finishes in Mortlake.
The idea for a boat race between Oxford and Cambridge Universities come about from Harrow school friends, Charles Merivale and Charles Wordsworth, who were studying at Cambridge and Oxford respectively at the time. Cambridge sent the first challenge to Oxford on the 12th of March 1829, starting a tradition that continues to the present day where the loser of the previous year's race challenges the opposition to a rematch.
The first Race took place at Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, and a reported crowd of twenty thousand travelled to watch the competition. After an initial stoppage at the beginning of the race, Oxford emerged as clear winners. The event was such a huge success that local townspeople decided to organise a regatta of their own which duly became the Henley Royal Regatta. After the first year, early Boat Races took place in Westminster, London, but by 1845 the Race had moved six-miles upstream to Putney in order to accommodate ever-increasing crowds. Since 1856 the Race has been held annually (except during the war years).
The modern-day Boat Race runs along the same lines as the original Race. In 1938, the BBC covered the Boat Race for the first time. Today the domestic television audience is approximately 9 million viewers with as many as 120 million additional viewers tuning in from overseas. The Race also draws a vast crowd down by the river with over 250,000 spectators linig the banks of the Thames to watch the crews battle it out for a place in history.
