Rowing and 'Elitism'

The past few days has seen a great deal of hue and cry about the actions of Trenton Oldfield, the 'anti-elitism' protestor who disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race at the weekend. No response to his actions could be more eloquent than that of Will Zeng, Oxford's two-man, and I don't intend to try and better it.

Mr Oldfield's protest has, whether we like it or not, led to a debate about rowing and 'elitism', which is what I'd like to consider today. Elitism is a term that has been bandied about so much it has almost lost all meaning. Those who use the term in connection with rowing seem to mean a variety of different things by it:


1. Rowing is an expensive sport, and can therefore only be practised by those who have the means to do so.

2. Rowing is associated in the public mind with 'elite' educational establishments: Oxford and Cambridge, the American Ivy League, and public schools. (Whether these institutions are 'elite' or 'elitist' is a question worth more in-depth consideration).

3. Rowing is 'elitist' in the sense that it is a competitive activity with clearly-defined winners and losers.

4. Rowing, and the characteristics it develops in those who practise it, can give rowers an edge in competitive situations in future life. If one believes that rowing is restricted to a small, privileged group within the population, then it might be considered to perpetuate that group's position and hence to entrench privilege.


There is something to these arguments, but I'd like to consider them from a different perspective.

Obviously, it is not the case that rowing is exclusively a pastime for the privileged. I know many people who do not come from wealthy backgrounds who derive a huge amount of pleasure from their sport and who give a huge deal back to it. To generalise these individuals out of the picture would be an insult to them. It is, however, also the case that rowing is practised disproportionately by the middle classes and above all by those who had access to the sport at school.

I can also see that there is some truth to the arguments that rowing and similar activities confer an advantage on those that practise them when it comes to any competitive situation they meet in their subsequent lives. These activities are not just athletic ones: drama, debating, student government and the like all teach hard-work, patience, organisation and other valuable skills. They are also all activities that are disproportionately made available to those receiving an education in the independent sector.

This is surely part of the reason why the graduates of independent schools go on to be disproportionately successful in their later careers. It is not simply a matter of the 'old school tie', but rather that these individuals have been given the opportunity to enhance their human capital outside of the classroom.

We should not be objecting to is not the right of our fellow-citizens to enjoy their leisure pursuits, but rather demanding that these opportunities be made available to a wider section of the population. Every time a middle-class bleeding-heart objects to these activities as elitist, all I can hear is the sound of the ladder being pulled away from those who actually might benefit from them.

For every Trenton Oldfield making a noisy protest against a group of abstract nouns, there are hundreds of volunteers from all walks of life who, united by nothing more than their passion for a sport, are quietly seeking to improve people's lives. The most ostensibly 'elitist' organisations are often at the forefront: the Henley Stewards give huge sums of money to support grass-roots rowing, for example. Oxford University Boat Club itself is a backer of London Youth Rowing. I personally am surely not alone in having given up huge amounts of my spare time to teaching rowing (and debating, for that matter) to those who did not have the advantages I had. And I myself ultimately owe my background in rowing to the generosity of others who, in the first place, put up scholarship money to enable me to go to an independent school and who subsidise the costs of equipment for impecunious students like myself.

If rowing is elitist, then it is elitism that should be made available to all.