How’s that for a minority opinion?
We happened to travel home by a bus that went from Putney past Mortlake. And next day, Easter Sunday, I happened to learn that the Oxford and Cambridge boat race would be on – an annual event of national importance to the English. Usually it’s from Putney to Mortlake around a great curve of the Thames. I remembered my father listening to the radio commentary on the race, punctuated by the evocative names of bridges and “eyots” (islets) that were landmarks along the river.
Last year the race was canceled because of Covid; this year it was held, but, both because of Covid and because repair work on Hammersmith Bridge was blocking the way, it was moved to another river, far out in the flat empty country of the fens (marshes) north of Cambridge, along a straight stretch of the Great Ouse. There, in the time of social distancing, it would be easy to keep spectating crowds away. But would the Cambridge crew have an advantage from having practised there?
I read up a little: this would be the 166th race, Cambridge had won 84 and Oxford 80. (There was one dead heat – the ideal result! – in 1877.) In the women’s race, which takes place an hour before the men’s, Cambridge also led, by 43 to 30. Last time, Cambridge was yet again the winner of both.
When you look at this information, you see the names of the crew, each boat’s cox and stroke and bow and the other six. (The Oxford bow was named James Forward; I’m sure there were jokes about that.) This brings them part way to life, and you, or at least I, start to guess how nervous they must be feeling.
Tilly managed to get us viewing on one of our devices. The patter of super-professional news commentators approaches the pressure of a water cannon. The women’s race had already passed, and Cambridge had won it yet again. I ought to be loyal to Cambridge, but my hope that Oxford would win was intensifying by the second.
Rowers (except for the cox who is at the stern, steering and conducting the pace) face backward. Within seconds, the Oxford rowers had to know that the other boat’s stern was pulling away out of their sight. Three miles to go.
“I can’t watch any more,” and I switched it off.
It’s far from uncommon to sympathize with underdogs. Yet millions, the majority, almost live for watching races, football, boxing, and half are footing for the losers. Can this be enjoyment?
One time in my childhood, we watched sheepdog trials on a Cumbrian mountain. That’s my earliest memory of a pang for the losers – I think the dogs knew they were being judged. The sport I went in for was tennis, but I had no competitiveness – I just liked the aesthetics of the action, so I would have preferred the opening warming-up time to continue indefinitely, the free indulgence in drives and lobs and slices and backhands and mashes without worrying about scoring points. Competitive sports are probably, at their atavistic root, a training for war. They are descended from the play-fighting of predatory animals’ cubs, which trains them to hunt. On Proxima Centauri B, the intelligent species is descended from a prey animal, and there is no war.
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This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Just another thought about how competitive spot affects the night sky….light pollution.so many of the people who play it and watch it want to do so at night and that means floodlights.when I lived in Oxford I use to like walking on Boars Hill at night and taking in some stargazing but then a outdoor sports facility opened in Abingdon a town over the hill and the light dome was,and presumably still is, awful.
Good point! Same problem here in San Francisco, and so many other places.
Not to mention those horrible Starlink satellites.
Ah yes don’t mention my favorite oligarch, Elon Musk!he’s a very selfish man claiming that he’s putting them there to raise money so he can go to Mars.it’s all to line his pockets.claiming that it’s for the benefit of folk in remote parts of the world what do those people want access to the latest episode of a Game of Thrones and floodlit sports or clean water and medicine?of course no fear of him getting to Mars in one piece as his rockets,all funded by NASA of course based on the dogma of public/private partnership,keep blowing up!his side kick Mr Richard Branson,oopps I forgot the Sir!, isn’t doing much better either.
Whatever their proclivities, I’m glad you didn’t totally reject predatory animals–we might not have your lovely painting of that beautiful predator at the top of this article.
I think the allure of sports is that you don’t know the outcome. With each pitch, the batter may miss the ball completely or hit a home run. It’s a form of escape. Personally, I don’t have time for such frivolity. My yoga practice gives me enough random aches and discoveries.
I read somewhere about the origin of swearing. A caveman picked up a stick and said “I wonder if I can hit this round rock into that hole.”
Did you ever row Guy? I bet you would be good at it!
It’s a highly cerebral activity. You have to see – and feel – that, with every stroke, you are doing exactly the same thing as seven other people. All while balancing on not much more than a two-by-four and contending with whatever wind, tide or current dishes out. That’s why even the casual observer is struck by the beauty and the synchrony of it.
What they may not realize is that they are also witnessing the delivery of more power (energy/time) than any other human activity.
Rowing may be the last purely amateur sport – there’s absolutely no money in it. Maybe that explains why it gets no press these days even though more people row now than ever and more than half of them are women.
Do read the inspirational “The Boys In the Boat” by Daniel James Brown (2013) – a bunch of kids, some leading incredibly hardscrabble lives, came out of the Pacific northwest woods to beat the world at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
That’s a fine paean to the sport. I didn’t know how high is the proportion of skill to strength. People ask me “You were at Cambridge, did you row?” – I didn’t even think of trying for the team. Of course I’ve rowed little boats on rivers for fun – may be doing it again at Oxford next month or so.
When I was a kid (around 1950, in Texas) I was forced to play sports without ever having been taught anything about them, an experience that left me with a lifelong hatred of any sport played with a ball. I don’t even like to watch sports. Even at the age of 82, I’m always afraid they’ll make me play.
Familiarity with Astronomy —and Astronomical myths, I always thought presupposes a familiarity with human nature. So the discomfort with competitive sports expressed here is a bit of a muchness. Or much of a muchness. It is also a stance indulged i by way too many intellectuals and others who think they are such. I am not much of a sport fan myself—I could not tell you the names of the current line up of the New York Yankees, and I only really pay any attention to sport when one of the New York Baseball teams get to the play-offs and also only during the Olympics—-otherwise I live a fairly sport -free life. But the concept never bothered me, neither did the fact that some colleagues are fans of various very competitive sports. The vaunting of a dislike for such sports, has always struck me as an upper class snobbish affectation of a dislike for a form of amusement perceived to be an indulgence of the middle, lower and working classes. I hope that is not your motive! I have always enjoyed the Astronomical Calendars, and the Astronomical Companion, etc, I’s hate to think the author would see me as a bit too prolish because of a rare indulgence in a World Series game! :-) As far as that theoretical prey species on Alpha Centauri b, consider that it may have evolved to fight its predator…..
Well done at not liking sports I’ve never liked them even as a child.i don’t know if Cambridge will have practiced on the Great Ouse as Cambridge’s river is the Cam although it’s not very big compared to the Thames which even as far up as Oxford is still pretty wide.Interestingly Cambridge and Bath are the only ancient English cities without cathedrals.Cambridge’s effectively being in Ely and Bath’s in Wells.i wonder if they punt and pray in cathedrals on Proxima Centarui B?
An immediate thought experiment:
On Proxima Centauri B there was an ecosystem with predators and prey animals. One of the prey animals evolved sufficient intelligence to completely evade all predation. Their erstwhile predators starved and went extinct. The intelligent species overpopulated their habitat, ran out of food, got sick, and went extinct. But they left archaeological ruins known throughout this sector of the galaxy for their harmonious proportions.
I’m generally not interested in competitive sports. If I played tennis, I would probably enjoy the warm up more than the game. Every four years I get interested in the football world cup. In 2018 I was rooting for Iceland. This morning I heard on the news that the Stanford women’s basketball team won the NCAA final by one point yesterday. Tara Vandeveer coached Stanford’s last NCAA women’s championship in 1992, and she’s still coaching! Even though I’m a University of California alumnus (Stanford vs. UC is California’s version of Cambridge vs. Oxford), I’m happy for Coach Vandeveer and the Stanford players.
I enjoy playing Scrabble, but defensive moves — blocking a triple word score square, hoarding “U” tiles if you suspect your opponent has a “Q”, etc. — make the game less enjoyable. So I try to convince my fellow Scrabblers to keep a cumulative score rather than individual scores. Each player’s words are added to our overall score, and the goal is to get the highest possible total score. Trading tiles with other players is allowed, and at the end of the game, when players have fewer than seven tiles apiece, all the tiles are put together and we all look for the best possible words to finish the board.
Ah, I thought this was going to be the sci-fi novel springing from my hint; but no, not yet. The prey-descended intelligent species could be intelligent enough to refrain from overpopulation.
I seem to remember that the Japanese game Go is cooperative, or has such a version. Chess can be played by people cooperating to develop the most interesting situations. I saw the comoany in an Afghan cafe playing chess sort of communally, walking around the table when they saw a move to take for the other side.
Well, THAT solves the problem of the “kibbitzer”. (The non-player in a chess game that offers usually unwanted advice–whether asked for or not, whether needed or not. .