| | Boat Race - The Oxford Revival |  | Author: Daniel Topolski
Publisher: Collins
Category: Book
List Price: £12.95
Buy Used: £2.45
You Save: £10.50 (81%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 168967
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 287
ISBN: 0002181177
EAN: 9780002181174
ASIN: 0002181177
Publication Date: March 28, 1985
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: A bit shabby
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| Customer Reviews:
Superbly written, gripping account January 26, 2008
I love this book - one of the best sports books I have ever read - arguably the greatest. It covers the years of Dan Topolski's greatest successes as an Oxford coach - 1973 to 1984, with a decent length chapter covering each year.
One of the book's strengths is that each chapter spends considerably more time on the training and selection than on the race itself. Any rower knows that it is the training that wins the race and that is so completely absorbing. The way that one's life comes to revolve around the daily or twice daily outings, the gym sessions and the growing exhaustion over weeks of hard training, always on the edge of overtraining and sometimes going over that edge, the cold of the Tideway in February, the ice on the oar handles and the bloodstains from the blisters. And then the shift as the racing season approaches, as the boat picks up speed and one begins to feel strong. All of this is poetically and realistically described.
These were great years for Oxford. I hated the Oxford crews at the time. I was at Cambridge from 72 to 75 (though not good enough to be considered for their crews) and then rowed competitively for much of the period of the book, so saw these crews in training, sometimes trained and raced with and against some of the people who are featured - including Topolski himself. Topolski's Oxford crews were not my favourite sight on the water. They just looked too good and sometimes a bit arrogant (and some of them were very fast crews). But reading the book (again and again) sends shivers down my spine because it brings one right inside the process of crew building. The account of the epic 1980 boatrace is just brilliant, as is the account of the Grand Challenge Cup final at Henley Royal Regatta in 1981.
There is of course another side to the Boat Race, one that comes across well in Martin Cross's book. So this is not the whole picture. But the whole experience of being in a crew is that it seems to dominate one's life, that perspective is lost, and this is what comes across in this book and what I think would make it relevant to people to whom the Boat Race is completely irrelevant.
This book is still for sale second hand. If you love rowing or sport at all, I would buy it.
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