Swimming to save us from tedium

As those of you who are white, middle-class and living in predominantly white, middle-class areas of Britain will know, last Saturday there was the Oxford-Cambridge Boat race. The rowers for the boat race trained six hours a day for six days a week. It's exploitation. We've taken muscular men from foreign countries that don't really understand what they're being trained to do, and we've tricked them into thinking it means something. I can just picture the scene now: dozens of men on rowing machines as ageing former-heroes of the rowing world whip them from behind.

“Please sir, you jus' say why you make me does this, ye?”

“No Xavier,” he says as he whips him for his insolence. “I ask the questions here. You're going to have to pull that imaginary oar back and forth for another hour now because of that.”

“But sir, me has wife and childrens back home, six hours a day is too many. I need see my babies, no?”

“Listen Xavier,” he says as he whips him again for bringing his personal life into the gym. “If you win this race, you will earn fame and riches throughout the land. Everybody will remember you, Xavier Mendez, as one of the eight men who won a rowing race. Everyone remembers rowers. Just think of Steve Redgrave, and... well... and Steve Redgrave dammit. Most people know his name.”

“Actually sir, back in Mexico Steve Redgrave not big name in most household.”

“Just be quiet and push the imaginary oar! You don't get a choice in this,” he says as he whips him again for sharing how Steve Redgrave doesn't really fit into the Mexican cultural frame of reference.

That is undoubtedly exactly how rowing works. Why else would anybody train for thirty-six hours a week when they could be taking drugs, having sex with prostitutes, getting drunk, going to the cinema to see a good film, listening to a decent album (or maybe not even a decent one, just one that other people have said “oh my god this album is terrible” and you finally get round to listening to it and yeah, it was terrible, and now you have something to talk about), seeing a friend, lying on the sofa watching T.V. and scratching your balls, sitting on the floor and doing nothing, lying on a patch of soil and doing nothing, eating some unpleasant food, like some rotten fruit or stale bread, being insulted by someone for whom you have a lot of respect, stubbing your toe on a door, eating a shard of glass, getting punched in the face by your childhood hero or rubbing your genitals against a cheese grater for thirty-six hours a week. All would be at least marginally more pleasant and worthwhile.

As you can see, rowing is not really 'my kind of thing,' and hence I find a three mile boat race between two universities which I am not smart enough to go to slightly boring. That's right I said it, I think the Great Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is slightly boring. I don't know why, but watching two boats run parallel against each other for a quarter of an hour, followed by interviews with rowers about rowing, doesn't really get my blood pumping. Which is why I was delighted when a man in a rubber suit managed to add a bit of controversy to the whole thing. It raised so many questions! Questions like, “I wonder why that man has decided to go swimming on a cold day in April? Why has he chosen to go swimming in the Thames at all? Is he not aware that muscular academics in rowing boats are trying to come through here? Is it a desperate proposal of marriage for Oxford's female cox? Did he see her warming up (for sitting down? Ha!), decide immediately that she was The One, run a couple of miles to get safely ahead of the boats and swim out across to meet her, shouting proclamations of love and promising his eternal devotion?”

Whatever his reasons, it made the race far more exciting, which is an inherently valuable thing. But fans of the Boat Race weren't congratulating the man but condemning him. For the first time ever people actually had something to say about the Boat Race other than “Hey, did you acknowledge the difference in speed between those two boats? Wowzer.” And that's a bad thing apparently.

I don't know, maybe I'm a bit out of touch with the contemporary rowing scene (the 1920s had the most exciting rowing scene if you ask me. Personally, if I was to go on Mastermind, my specialist subject would probably be “Cambridge and Oxford rowers of the 1920s,” but alas I think I'm just not cut out for the newfangled rowing of the 21^st century). All I know is that when the next Boat Race comes along I will be watching just in case a man gets his head cut off with an oar on live television. You don't want to miss out on that sort of thing.