The annual cattle market - I mean official weigh in - for the Oxford and Cambridge boat race squads took place in the glamorous surroundings of the Hurlingham club on Tuesday morning.
In a new move the Goldie and Isis crews had been pre-weighed and were sitting fully clothed when the waiting media were ushered into the room. As well as speeding things up, this also enabled the Goldie crew to get one over on the members of the Cambridge blue boat, as they hoovered up the entire supply of food left in the crew changing room for the light blue squad -- leaving Cambridge president Tom James mistakenly complaining to the organisers that their food had never appeared.
On the other side, the Oxford blue boat was busy getting oiled up in advance of their uni-suited media call (I've been assured that pictures of the semi-clothed oiled up rowers have been posted on a website somewhere and I'm currently investigating blackmail strategies to find out the web address... purely to advance public knowledge of course).
Boat race media coverage is usually one big trivia fest - oldest, youngest, tallest, smallest, most foreign oarsmen etc; this year's new statistic became obvious after Cambridge stroke Thorsten Engelmann weighed in at a whopping 110.8kg (that's 244.3 lbs in old money for those who don't do metric) the heaviest ever competitor in the race, or, as the presenter succinctly put it: "he's a big chap".
Later on I walked past two Oxford rowers one of whom was lamenting to the other "Man, I drank two litres, and I still only weigh 95kg" - some things never change.
Cambridge is heavier overall than Oxford by an average of 9.5lbs a man, a margin which even managed to surprise Tom James. Interestingly, against usual coach practice, the heaviest rowers are in the stroke, 7 and 2 seats while the lightest is in the 5 seat.
The main news from the Oxford camp, is that they have been trying out some last minute changes to crew order, and that the changes are likely to be final. Watching them on the water later it appeared that they had moved bow and three forward to three and five, while president Robin Ejsmond-Frey moves back from 5 to the bow seat, quite a large re-shuffle this close to race day and it will be interesting to see if it makes a difference to their performance.
This year's race sees another sizeable North American contingent taking part. Oxford has five Americans in the crew, as well a Pole, a Canadian, and a Croatian:
While Cambridge has one American and two Canadians, as well as two Germans:
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