torpids...!

Torpids were the big rowing races of this term between all of the colleges at Oxford. I’m rowing for my college, St. Hilda’s, this term, and as posted before, have been in the second VIII and training quite hard the past many weeks.


Torpids is a series of races over four days (Wednesday – Saturday). The crews are all separated into divisions based on the finishing positions of each crew in Torpids the previous year, we started at the bottom of division three on Wednesday. The goal of the races is to catch up to and ‘bump’ the boat in front of you, which can be accomplished by either catching up to a point where the cox in the boat in front of you concedes, or, if they don’t concede, you actually crash into them with you boat! Madness on the river is the only way to describe it. Each division contains twelve boats, so for the start of the race, all twelve boats are lined up along the river with a boat length and a half between them. When the start gun goes off, everyone takes off and tries to get to the boat ahead of them. When you bump the boat ahead of you, you pull over on the side of the river and then the boats behind you can catch up and bump the same boat as well (called over-bumping). At the end of each day, the boats that have bumped switch places in the line up with the boats they bumped, and the race continues with a new start order the following day. The ultimate accomplishment in bumps racing in Oxford is to earn ‘blades’ which you get if you bump every of the four days of racing…


My crew performed extremely well, showing off all of the hard work we did in about 20 hours of training each week all term. We started out in position 12 of our division. Wednesday, we successfully triple-over-bumped Lincoln College’s 2nd VIII (meaning they started four boats ahead of us and we caught them). Thursday we over-bumped Wolfson College’s 2nd VIII, and Friday we over-bumped Corpus Christi’s 1st VIII. That meant that Saturday we were rowing with a chance at earning the coveted blades… The crew was really pumped and we gave it our all. In the end, we chased many boats down the entire 2.5km course on the river, and in the end, many of the boats in front of us had bumped out, and we ended up just one boat-length away from triple-over-bumping for blades!! We were so close it was painful not to quite catch them. If only there had been another 200 meters on the river! Oh well, in the end we were ranked as the highest 2nd VIII on the river, which is an incredible achievement in itself. It was great fun while it lasted, and a very unique Oxford experience and we had a fabulous fun and happy crew; wouldn’t trade it for the world.