In a very good foreword to this book, Steve Redgrave elegantly highlights the difference between the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race and an Olympic six-boat final. "In the Boat Race there are no silver medals," he says. "There is no second place - you win or you lose." When I was coaching Oxford crews in the 70s and 80s, I underscored that same point in my pre-race briefing: "This 20-minute race will define you for the rest of your lives - win or lose."
There is little difference between preparing crews for the Olympics or for the Boat Race, which is the only university sporting event that produces international-class athletes capable of walking straight into national teams, and crews that can often match most Olympic eights for speed. The Boat Race athletes are preparing for a 4¼ mile race in the spring, while the Olympians race over 2,000 metres in the summer, but the basic training is the same for both.
A third of any British men's rowing team is usually composed of former Boat Race athletes, so the standard is very high. In Beijing this weekend, where I will be commentating for BBC television, there will be nine Oxbridge rowers - seven British, a Canadian and a Croatian. Three of the women's team raced in the women's Boat Race. Sponsorship and lottery support have made a big difference to the athletes in the national team, though the Boat Race itself provides no financial benefit. So rowers can indeed claim to be the last amateurs.
Mark de Rond, an Oxford-educated ethnographer teaching in Cambridge, sets out to live and breathe the lives of the exceptional and dedicated rowers of the 2007 Cambridge crew in their six months preparing for the varsity contest. As a stranger both to these particular athletes and to high-octane sport in general, it is a difficult balancing act. His mission is two-fold: to chart the minutiae of their journeys as people, and to examine and analyse them in scientific terms - their motives, the chemistry and relationships between them, their personal tragedies and triumphs.
It is an ambitious project that sucks him further and further into events and the personal lives of his subjects, to the detriment of any clear conclusions. Ultimately, he "goes native" - eschewing his scientific project, his purpose. "Little do I realise that my experience as ethnographer will prove among the least useful," he writes, "and that my survival within the squad will come to hinge critically on my skills in conflict resolution." The other surprise discovery he makes is that he comes to see in the athletes "everything that I am not: virility, masculinity, youth, beauty, foolishness".
In the early chapters, he convincingly describes and examines what drives this elite and reclusive group of men to endure the hardship and sacrifice of the most intense competitive pressure. He gives intelligent and thoughtful voice to the essentials that make up the 180-year-old Boat Race experience.
The scenes he describes are very familiar to me, as someone involved for over 40 years as an Oxford Boat Race athlete, coach and now adviser. Oxford and Cambridge are mirrors of each other, absolute partners and rivals for almost every step of the way. The internal battles for selection, friend against friend; the disappointments; the training-camp existence; the personalities - all are perfectly matched by the opposition.
De Rond captures well the fragile egotism that is an essential part of any top-class athlete's psychological makeup; their single-mindedness and selfishness during selection battling uncomfortably with their desire for comradeship and team-building. As the unsuccessful athletes fall by the wayside, the successful ones huddle together until finally the chosen eight crew members and cox emerge, heads held high. It is the perfect team sport - but only after 20 or so others have been cast aside.
Though he is an "outsider" who has never "done it", De Rond succeeds in conjuring up the lives of athletes in extremis, under constant pressure to perform - and study. There are good descriptions of the intense rivalry of two 6ft 8in world champions vying for the right to sit in the important stroke seat and lead the crew. The detail of the selection processes is generally meticulous, but there is one glaring gap in the narrative as a key selection battle looms and a discarded oarsman prepares to fight back to regain a place in the boat. There is, unexpectedly, no chronicling of what would have been an absorbing drama. His name simply appears in the final line-up.
De Rond also offers a stream of literary and artistic references, drawing on Shakespeare, Conrad, Larkin, Orwell, Kipling, Kerouac, Coleridge, Bellow, Malinowski, Cecil Beaton and David Lodge to illuminate his story. These sit well with the extended monologues and emails of the athletes as they seek to analyse their emotions and ambitions.
The Cambridge crew included five world and Olympic medallists - three of them gold - making them the most star-studded eight to grace the Boat Race in many years. For an Oxford supporter it was a surprise - and a source of some considerable pride - that Cambridge eventually won by barely more than one length, after 4¼ miles of gruelling racing against gallant and defiant rivals lacking such heady credentials. The explanation for this apparent underperformance is found in part in the pages of The Last Amateurs
De Rond manages to give himself something of a leading role in the story, by writing in the first person, which gets a little irritating (and confusing for a non-rower). He also emerges as a mediator in some of the heated selection debates between the coaching team and the highly strung athletes. At times he is even called upon to help resolve disputes, on one occasion being handed responsibility by the coach for chairing a critical meeting.
But there is a Zelig quality that pervades The Last Amateurs. De Rond insinuates himself more and more into the story, relating his dreams, what he, "the boys" and Rebecca the cox had for breakfast, and even details of his bodily functions that many reader might prefer not to know. His pre-race nerves are at one point so out of control that he has to be calmed down by the coach.
But there is a lot about this particular Boat Race story that failed to make the final cut. One jarring omission is the fact that, after the event, it emerged that the strongest and most vital crew member was ineligible to compete since he had not completed his academic course at Cambridge; he left as soon as the race was over to join the German national team, in violation of one of the few rules of this amateur event - that the competitors are bona fide members of the university.
There was also considerable fallout that might have provided a rich source of material for De Rond the ethnographer. One athlete, championed by his team-mates on the grounds of personality - a scenario I recognise from my own coaching experience - was selected despite the coach's decision to exclude him. The coach, his authority severely undermined by his perceived capitulation to his crew's demands, did not have his contract renewed after just three years in the job. And neither of the German superstars who returned to the national eight will be appearing in Beijing this weekend: they were dropped from their Olympic team earlier this year.
· Daniel Topolski's True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny is published by Bantam
