At the end of a boat race one crew always sits up straight, breathing
hard but smiling. That is the winning crew. In the other shell, which
has come exactly the same distance, the men fall over their oars,
exhausted. Some of them faint. That is the losing crew. Last week on
the Thames it was the Light Blue crew of Cambridge that sat up
straight, the Oxford crew that fainted. “And well they might,” said a gentleman standing in Prime Minister
Baldwin's party to one of the equerries of King Amanullah of
Afghanistan who was looking through binoculars at the Oxford men
falling backward and forward in the narrow shell. Behind the barges
filled with notables, butchers, bakers, and fishmongers, decorated with
ribbons of various colors, sat on the roofs of taxicabs, shaking their
heads. Even those who had bet on Cambridge felt a pleasant pity for the
losing crew and felt they could afford that pity. Calm, strong,
confident, Cambridge took the lead in the first five strokes, wore the
Oxford crew out in the first mile, finished ten lengths ahead at the
end of the four-and-a-half-mile course from Putney to Mort Lake. Oxford
has not won the race since 1923.
