Whoever wins the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, it’s already a victory for women

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/09/boat-race-victory-for-women

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To the boats! This Saturday will be historic, even if you don’t give a water-rat’s tail about boats, rowing, Oxford or Cambridge. Women have been rowing for Oxford and Cambridge since 1927, but this will be the first year that they have been allowed to row on the same stretch of the Thames as the men, and the first time their race will be televised. The decision had something to do with money, of course: first Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management, chose to sponsor the women’s crew so they didn’t have to pay out £2,000 apiece for their kit and training (only 0.7% of sports sponsorship is given to women). Then a sponsorship deal for the men’s race was followed by a decision that women no longer had to be banished to a far stretch of river, and that perhaps television viewers might like to watch them too. Clare Balding, wonderfully, has chosen to commentate the women’s boat race rather than the Grand National. What with that and the success of the brilliant This Girl Can campaign, maybe we’ll finally start to see a level of coverage of women’s sport that actually reflects reality. Though that’s unlikely, when we get only 7% of coverage across TV and print, and only 2% in newspapers (including this one). I’ve given up reading the sports sections because they’re not for me, are they? I get my inspiration instead from running up fells, sometimes in the company of athletes such as Nicky Spinks, a 47-year-old cancer survivor who last week ran the Bob Graham round, 66 miles over 42 of the Lake District’s greatest peaks, in 18 hours and six minutes, beating her own record by six minutes. An amazing achievement that dwarfs anything a spoilt, overpaid bloke can do with a ball.

The solace of sea food

More boats, except these are ships. Last week an ad invited applications for a ship’s cook on a vessel belonging to Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), a privately funded search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean. The ad was widely written about, and made me remember fondly Pinky, the cook on MV Kendal, the ship on which I spent five weeks in 2010, travelling from the UK to Singapore. Pinky was Filipina, and had learned her skills on a short “European cooking” course. They were, er, interesting: a frankfurter stuffed with mayonnaise was one special. I sometimes saw officers standing in bewilderment at the buffet. But Pinky was one of the most important people on the ship: when there’s no TV and no internet beyond dial-up email, food is one thing that brings seafarers together in a workplace that can be remote, lonely and isolating. Even if they only spent six minutes eating it. I counted.

Tour de Yorkshire recycled

April news from here in Yorkshire: t’ lambs are born, and the bikes are coming. Tour de Yorkshire is back. Not the real Tour, but a new festival and race born of the massive success of le bike race last year which sent top cyclists zipping along our lanes and roads, trailing in their wake proper infectious joy, from Leeds city centre, where I waited hours for the peloton to zoom past in a second or two, to Buttertubs pass – forever now Cote de Buttertubs – in the Dales. Joy for all that is, except the resident of Keighley who allegedly spray-painted a four-letter word on the road – or in his field, depending on which rumour you prefer – causing the cameras to switch off, to the town’s chagrin. In happier news, many of the yellow-painted bikes or dotty facades that were created last year were never removed, so we don’t have to pay for new ones. Thrifty Yorkshire folk.