Turning the Tide: Why Historic Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is Leaning on Long-Form Storytelling 🚣
At a time when short-form content dominates, The Boat Race is leaning the other way, towards longer, more thoughtful storytelling, through their YouTube docuseries, Turning the Tide.
2 April 2025
The Boat Race is really hard. Not just physically - but in terms of storytelling, too.
Each year, two crews from Oxford and Cambridge take to London’s unpredictable Tideway in one of sport’s most historic rivalries.
It’s an endurance test on choppy, tidal waters, where split-second decisions can win or lose the race. But it’s also incredibly unique: it’s perhaps the only example of collegiate sport in the UK that is contested so publicly.
The race gets global visibility thanks to its live broadcast on the BBC. For many people, this is the only time they see rowing outside of perhaps the Olympics. But if your first exposure to rowing is The Boat Race, you’d be forgiven for thinking all rowing looks like this.
The truth is, it doesn’t - and that’s part of the challenge.
“The Tideway is a difficult stretch of water,” explained Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race and a former winner with Cambridge. “It’s wavy, it’s not flat, it’s not contained, it’s not still… Even putting your blades in on the start, what people find really interesting is, it’s an incredibly difficult thing to do.”
That kind of detail often gets lost on race day, especially for viewers unfamiliar with the sport. Add to that the fact that the people in the boats change almost every year…
Unlike most professional sports teams, where players might stay for many seasons, The Boat Race is driven by student-athletes juggling full-time academic schedules with a six-month training programme. Some might compete for one year, others maybe two or three.
That turnover makes building familiarity and fan connection more difficult. But instead of seeing this as a weakness, The Boat Race has flipped it into a strength, leaning into storytelling, relatability, and athlete-led content.
At a time when short-form content dominates, The Boat Race is leaning the other way, towards longer, more thoughtful storytelling.
“We did some short-form content prior to that, but we just felt the longer form content would be better to kind of educate and to inform people in a more interesting way,” said Cassidy, speaking on the Sports Pundit Podcast. “So you don’t get to assume things.”
Their YouTube docuseries, Turning the Tide, follows both crews in the build-up to race day. It’s embedded storytelling. Photographer Ben Tufnell and Olympic medallist Tom Ransley are part of the media team, spending months inside the camps.
“Ben has been taking photos of the teams and covering media pieces since 2021. The coaches are very relaxed with him and Tom, and the students trust them being around - almost don’t notice them, actually. He’s sort of one of the team.”
That level of trust allows for deeper, more intimate content.
You see early morning training sessions, the academic pressures, and the emotional highs and lows. It’s an honest portrait of what it takes to row at this level while studying at two of the world’s most competitive universities.
“It’s that human interest story which engages people beyond the rowing fans,” Cassidy explained.
In many ways, one of the Boat Race's greatest strengths is that its athletes are so relatable. They’re not media-trained millionaires, they’re students training in the dark before lectures.
Many are social media-native and also post behind-the-scenes footage that complements the official series. They're not waiting for permission, they’re telling stories in their own way.
“Some of them are really great at doing that as well,” Cassidy said. “They’ll produce their own stuff and release that. They’ll give insights.”
One standout example is Cambridge’s Tom Lynch, who posted a 10-part video series on his 2024 Boat Race journey. All the footage was captured during training, mostly using his glasses (Meta Ray-Bans) and phone.
Ultimately, this relatability often trumps celebrity.
The videos from The Boat Race and rowers like Tom Lynch are never going to top the trending charts… but that’s not the point.
It is important to remember, it shouldn’t always be about extracting the most views. Sometimes it pays to have a longer-term approach.
The Boat Race is focused on inspiring a generation of rowers - something which they see already happens with clicks on British Rowing’s ‘learn to row’ spiking after the race broadcast.
The hope is that having this longer on-ramp for the curious, through free-to-access content on YouTube, helps to convert even more people into rowers.
In my view, it’s refreshing to see a rightsholder focused on building something deeper. Not just marketing a moment, but inviting people into a journey. One that starts long before the boats line up and one that stays with you after they cross the finish just before Chiswick Bridge.
Sometimes the stories worth telling take a little longer to unfold.