Why Chanel fell for the Boat Race
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Like any British institution, the Boat Race is steeped in peculiarity. Established between Oxford and Cambridge universities in 1829, the premise is simple: every spring, two crews of eight row four miles and 374 yards upstream from Putney Bridge to Mortlake. The first to finish wins.
The “private” match between the UK’s two oldest and most rivalrous universities is watched by 200,000 spectators lining the Tideway course, with a global audience of around 100mn. Though billed as a “quintessentially British” sporting event, the amateur squads of 157 full-time students competing for selection include world-class oarsmen and women – this year spanning 18 nationalities and six Paris 2024 Olympians. Rivalry can get spicy: in March, a week before crew selection was announced, a row erupted when three Cambridge PGCE students were deemed ineligible to race, despite PGCE students having raced in previous years. Cath Bishop, the British Olympic silver medallist who won the 1993 race in the Cambridge Blue boat, called the decision “madness… and a new low in relations between Oxford and Cambridge boat clubs”.
The course itself is a test of endurance and strategy: more than three times the length of an Olympic side-by-side rowing race, it takes in multiple bends, bridges and the incoming flood tide. In the visceral spirit of a culture that codified chasing foxes across fields, competitors can barely stand when they cross the finish line. In 2024, the Cambridge stroke Matt Edge collapsed after he “pushed a few too many chips”. (Cambridge still won, as it has in five of the past seven events; the men’s Blue boat leads overall with 87 victories to Oxford’s 81.) As Matthew Pinsent, the British four-time Olympic champion who has rowed in three Boat Races for Oxford and won two – and this year will umpire the women’s race – attests: “It’s a brutal race.”
On 13 April at 13.21, when the women’s 2025 race starts, and at 14.21, when the men’s commences, another quirk will present itself: Chanel, the French luxury house, will become the Boat Race’s titular sponsor and official timekeeper. Now known as the Chanel J12 Boat Race, it represents Chanel’s first sports sponsorship, with its bestselling J12 watch as the appointed chronograph. Set against a backdrop of luxury megadeals with sporting events, the Boat Race is a relative minnow. What did Chanel see in it? “I am sure it’s perceived as unexpected,” says Frédéric Grangié, the president of Chanel watches and fine jewellery, of the long-term partnership. “I had been thinking for years about timekeeping and synchronicity and how you express that.”
His first meeting with executives from The Boat Race, the company that organises the contest, was auspicious: it took place on 10 June, the same date as the first men’s race almost 200 years ago. The 2025 race will coincide with 100 years of Chanel’s presence in the UK, and 25 years since the J12 watch was released.
A keen back-country skier, but not a rower, Grangié believes the Boat Race is “culturally extraordinarily important”. He sees in the near-perfect moment of calibration when individual rowers perform in sync, known as “swing”, a neat parallel for the beat of the J12’s Calibre 12.1 automatic movement. (The watch takes its name from 12m J Class racing yachts.) “What’s amazing is that the race itself is a perfect illustration of what it takes to make some of the greatest watches in the world: the collective pursuit of excellence, and the engine itself.”
Then there is founder Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s love of nautical sports. “She was all about freedom of movement,” says Grangié, citing her 1921 creation of a sport department. Given that Chanel spent a lot of time in London in the 1920s while conducting a love affair with the Duke of Westminster, Grangié thinks “for sure she knew about the race”.
But why should anyone – let alone a Frenchman – still care about a 20-minute collegiate rowing fixture? Perhaps the oddity of the Boat Race is dictated by the sport itself. Paradoxically, this most physically demanding of activities is also a profoundly mental exercise. The front-loaded Boat Race, in particular, requires rowing at full pelt while enduring acute pain. “Your legs hurt, your lungs are burning. It’s a mental challenge: how do you keep going?” says Oxford women’s president Annie Anezakis.
Mental fortitude is inculcated by seven months of pitch-black 5am starts and 8,000kcal diets fuelling 12 mud-slathered training sessions a week, in below-freezing and skin-soaking conditions. After five hours of daily training, athletes hit the library. Anezakis, for instance, has a pharmacology master’s and is studying graduate-entry medicine; her Cambridge counterpart Lucy Havard, who is ineligible to race but is part of the squad, is a qualified doctor studying for a history PhD.
Effective eights must subordinate individual strength to the collective’s propulsive rhythm. “It’s the ultimate team sport,” says Oxford men’s president Tom Mackintosh, an Olympic gold medallist for New Zealand’s men’s eight and the reigning world bronze medallist in the single scull. This is his first Boat Race. “You’ve got to get eight or nine people doing the exact same thing, in a high-pressure environment, for between – at an Olympic level – five to seven minutes, and the Boat Race, for about 15 minutes. Total cohesion is a skill.” It also brings rewards: a 2009 study of 12 rowers from the Oxford squad found that teammates who exercised together were able to tolerate twice as much pain as when they trained alone.
“There’s a real intensity to a race when it’s just you and one other crew. It feels like it’s life or death,” says Cambridge men’s president Luca Ferraro, who has won two out of three of his Boat Race campaigns. “People identify as dark or light blue, there is no in‑between,” agrees Anezakis. Winning means everything, says Ferraro: “Crossing the line with eight of your best friends, it’s complete ecstasy.”
But it’s the mundane moments that create lasting relationships. When asked about their favourite Boat Race memories, not one rower mentions race day. “So much of it is just the process,” says Ferraro. “You have to enjoy doing physically challenging sessions on the rowing machine, then having a meal when you feel cooked; everyone else feels cooked. You enjoy that feeling together.” Sarah Winckless, the two-time British world champion who rowed in three Boat Races for Cambridge and will umpire 2025’s men’s race, cherishes a car journey back from training. “I had just been selected for the boat, and ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’ came on the radio,” she says. “You can imagine the bad singing. But I was so happy!”
Are rowers made of stronger stuff? Mark de Rond, a Cambridge University professor and anthropologist, thinks so. De Rond studies subcultures by immersing himself in distinct social groups, including spending seven hours a day for 199 days with the Cambridge male crew training for the 2007 race. “They are people who would be unhappy with anything that’s not as perfect as they can make it, in any aspect of their life. That’s why rowers are great students. They turn up to class before anyone else,” he laughs.
What does it take to win? “When Hugh Laurie lost the Boat Race in 1980, he said something like ‘the Boat Race is won as soon as one of the crews decide they can no longer win’. On race day, the crews will be roughly on par physiologically,” says de Rond. “What’s going to differentiate them in large part is how headstrong they are.” Laurie also had a theory on why the “exquisite” pleasure of winning a rowing race remains unequalled: “You’re facing backwards, so you’re looking at the person you’re beating.” When you put it that way, who wouldn’t want to be involved?
The Boat Race 2025 is on 13 April; theboatrace.org
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