Lent Bumps

Before you get too excited, I didn't actually row in Lent Bumps.  While upper boats are guaranteed a spot based on their performance in previous years, lower boats have to race in order to "Get On," with only the top seven boats getting slots.  This year there were 21 boats competing for those seven places, so it was quite competitive.  We came in 10th, which I think was quite respectable, but it was disappointing to not get to race (although my knees are basically falling apart, so it's probably better for me that we didn't).

However, it was still really fun to experience bumps as a spectator (virtual spectator that is; I didn't actually go to any of the races).  For those who aren't familiar with bumps, here's a rundown:

Basically, the reason we have bumps races is that the Cam is really narrow.  This means that it is hard to do head-to-head regattas (with two or more boats racing side by side) and the ones that there are are quite short since they are limited to the widest part of the river.  We do a lot of time-trial races, but those aren't very exciting, so the other type of racing we do are bumps.

Bumps entails exactly what it seem like it would.  Boats start in a staggered order and the goal is to literally bump into the boat in front of you before the boat behind you bumps into you.  The starting order is determined by the results from the previous year, so clubs that are historically strong (like First at Third, Caius, LMBC etc.) are near the top.  If you bump someone, the next day the two boats switch places, and you move up one.  If you're bumped, you move down one.  If you "row over" (i.e., are neither bumped nor bump anyone) you stay in the same place.  There are also such things as "over bumps." This is when the boat in front of you gets a bump and then they and the boat in front of them are taken out of the race.  Then you have a chance to bump a boat three places in front of you, so you move up three places.  This year, there was actually a double overbump in one of the divisions, where a boat moved up five places!

Bumps are four days long.  Basically, this means that the only people who would realistically end up "head of the river" (i.e., the number one boat) are those that are in the top five spots to begin with.  However, this doesn't mean that there's no point racing lower down in the division.  If you bump up four places (either bumping every day, or over bumping and bumping again or whatever combination) then you are awarded "blades" (those big oars that hang in the boathouse or the pub and have the names of the crew and of the boats you bumped on them).  If the opposite happens, and you fall four places, you get "spoons."

As should be pretty obvious, bumps are endemically unfair races.  If you happen to have an unusually good boat but are not normally a strong club, you can get blades easier than if boats were just ranked by a time trail to determine the starting order.  But that's kind of just the way it works.  This year, the big news was whether First and Third would keep the headship in the two women's and men's divisions.  They actually lost both to Downing early in the week, and then Caius bumped Downing to take Headship for the men, so it was pretty exciting.  Churchill didn't do phenomenally.  Our top men's boat was bumped and then rowed over for the rest of the time, and our women were bumped twice and then rowed over.  However, our second men's boat was bumped once, rowed over once, but then bumped on both of the last days, which was nice for them.  Some clubs had an even more embarrassing week (watch for the LMBC boat at about 27 seconds in this video of M1 division):

Now everyone is calling them Lady Margaret Beached Crew