Oxford celebrate end of decade of women’s Boat Race hurt as men share honours in feisty encounter

Ten years since their last win on the Championship Course there were hoots and cheers of relief and delight as Oxford brought an end to a bruising Boat Race drought. Cambridge had won the last eight editions; president Gemma King, by far the most experienced rower of either side, had won five of her six races on this course. The Dark Blues faced a forbidding task but even throughout the years of those chastening defeats they were beginning to rebuild.

And there was even more on the line this year: for Annie Anezakis, this was her last chance before graduating from her medicine postgrad, after being on the losing side on three occasions. For Olympic bronze medallist and president Heidi Long, this was a last shot at another lifelong dream before completing her master’s in September, powered by the grief of losing her father Keith – an endless champion of her rowing career – to pancreatic cancer in 2023. Inevitably cycles come to an end; tides turn.

Cambridge were bidding for a ninth straight win but their pursuit of yet more glory came to an end on a classic April day, grey with the hovering threat of downpour, on a choppy course more akin to rowing on the sea. The Boat Race is simultaneously unlike any other sporting event and exactly the same. Maybe there’s an element of masochism from the spectators, watching people suffer on the water for 20 minutes; maybe it’s the glimpse into a completely alien world, but there is a buzz around this that endures year after year.

And it has all the ingredients of a classic sporting contest: tribal loyalty, skullduggery and gamesmanship, and plenty of people just there to get hammered. As the clocked ticked down to the 2. 21pm start time (designed to take advantage of the incoming tide) the banks of the Thames were lined with gilet-clad, Chelsea boot-wearing punters, drawn to the sizzle of barbecues outside the line of rowing clubs along this stretch of the river.