Hotels for The Boat Race 2027

Two crews, one river, and a rivalry that stretches back to the 1800s. Crowds gather along the banks for free, spilling out of pubs and parks to watch the boats pass in a matter of seconds after months of training. There's no seating, no tickets, and no fixed vantage point that guarantees the best view, so people stake out spots on bridges, towpaths and riverside greens hours beforehand. The atmosphere owes as much to the crowd as to the race itself, with clapping and shouting rolling along the bank as the crews go by.

The Boat Race began in 1829, when Cambridge student Charles Merivale challenged his old school friend Charles Wordsworth, by then at Oxford, to a race between the two universities — run, that first year, not on the tidal Thames but upriver at Henley. Oxford won comfortably, and the fixture returned only sporadically before becoming an annual event and eventually settling on the championship course from Putney to Mortlake.

In nearly two centuries of racing there has been only one dead heat, in 1877, when the judge could not separate the two crews at the line; it remains the closest official result the race has ever produced. Today's course, the crowds along the Chiswick and Hammersmith banks and the free public vantage points all descend from that first, much smaller contest at Henley.