A bitter boat race

Blood Over Water by David and James Livingston. Bloomsbury; £18.99

FROM the outside looking in, intervarsity rivalry is somewhat difficult to explain. Whereas it’s relatively easy to understand the ties that bind a young sportsperson to a club or a school, the speed and intensity with which many are woven into the fabric of a university is something of a curate’s egg.

Most participants are passing through, representing a faceless behemoth of an institution, the identities of team-mates changing every 12 months; yet the affinities are often life-defining for the protagonists.

How do you explain how the first years on UCC’s rugby teams know the words of The College Victory Song within weeks of clapping eyes on the Mardyke?

Why do competitors in Irish intervarsity disciplines as diverse as ultimate frisbee and fencing share a mutual disdain for all things Trinity, who in turn, have something of a siege mentality?

David and James Livingston do a fine job of plumbing the depths of a bloody-minded desire to win at all costs, in the name of your college — with a fascinating sibling feud thrown in.

A shared love of rowing, but divergent academic paths, saw them pitched against each other in the famed Oxford V Cambridge Boat Race in 2003, the first brothers in rival crews in more than a century.

This was no playful sibling rivalry; seven months of eye-wateringly intense training was the precursor to a four-mile race that saw them go to the outer reaches of their physical limits to annihilate each other on the River Thames, fuelled by a surprisingly powerful mutual loathing. A modern-day Cain and Abel, almost.

Blood Over Water’s format takes a little time to adjust to: first-person, diary-style extracts jolt the reader from boat to boat, from one camp to another. Nonetheless, the brothers tell their respective stories honestly and engagingly; it soon becomes apparent that their sacrifice and dedication — at amateur level, lest we forget — reach strikingly obsessive levels.

But like all superior sports memoirs, what makes this stand out is that the reader is taken above and beyond the sporting event itself. The psychological journey each brother goes on is particularly gruelling; James, the elder, is in the last-chance saloon, having come agonisingly close to victory the year before, while David has lived in the shadow of his elder sibling and is determined to prove he belongs in the same company. And therein lies a metaphor that helps explain intervarsity culture; the weight of history and fear of not meeting the standards of those who have gone before.

Come the endgame, uncertainty reigns; the 2003 race was the closest one in history, bar the solitary (and debatable) dead heat in 1877. One brother wonders ‘has it all been worth it?’, but is later wracked with guilt: “How could I have done this to him?”

It is worth noting that if you do not know the result of the 2003 race, and wish to read in ignorance, ensure you ignore the book’s photography inserts until the end, as they give the game away. But there’s little else to tarnish a superlative tale of humanity and heroism that will strike a chord with anyone who, quite simply, has ever wanted to win at something.