The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race blogs are back with a bang following a winter break, with the two university squads recounting action from an incident-packed few weeks.
Cambridge report from their winter camp in Banyoles, Spain, where they spent 10 days in early January training on the lake used for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Oxford, meanwhile, use the blogs to cover their ill-fated Trial Eights event in December in which one of their boats suffered a pump failure in freezing conditions and the race had to be abandoned.
The new behind-the-scenes diaries have been uploaded to www.theboatrace.org and will be joined by regular updates all the way up to the Xchanging Boat Race on 3 April.
"The blogs have proved a great success since they first appeared in October 2009 and they continue to attract a lot of attention from our website visitors," said David Searle, Executive Director of the Boat Race Company Limited (BRCL). "This is testament to the excellent content that the squads continue to produce."
The 156th Boat Race sponsored by Xchanging - the fast-growing international pure-play business processing company - will be staged at 16:30 on Saturday 3 April and screened live on BBC 1 within a two-hour programme. The 2009 Boat Race won by Oxford was also televised in 153 countries around the world.