The event, which sees the Presidents representing the losing teams of the previous year’s races formally challenge those from the winning teams, was held at London’s Somerset House.
Oxford’s Tobias Bernard and Heidi Long and their victorious Cambridge counterparts Noam Mouelle (Hughes Hall) and Gemma King (St John’s College) faced off before shaking hands in front of the London audience.
First raced in 1829 between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, The Boat Race 2026 will be held on Easter Saturday 04 April with the Women’s Boat Race at 14.21 and the Men’s Boat Race an hour later, at 15.21.
Cambridge, the Light Blues, have held the upper hand with a clean sweep of both Boat Races in 2025. Oxford, the Dark Blues, will be determined to turn the tide in 2026. The records stand at 88-81 in favour of Cambridge Men and 49-30 to Cambridge Women.
The event also saw Channel 4 welcomed as the new free-to-air TV home of The Boat Race, with the broadcaster announcing that they have secured the rights in a multi-year agreement.
Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race Company, said: “We are delighted to work with Channel 4 to broadcast our unique, iconic and intensely British event between our two world-leading Universities.”
In other news, Cambridge University Boat Club (CUBC) has announced that Chair, Annamarie Phelps CBE OLY, has been elected Vice President of World Rowing. Phelps learnt to row at St John’s College and raced for Blondie (Cambridge Women’s Reserves) in 1987, beating Osiris (Oxford Women’s Reserves) by 12 seconds. She went on to represent Great Britain at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and five World Championships, winning gold at Račice in 1993.
And a week of fantastic racing proved golden for Cambridge at the 2025 World Rowing Championships in Shanghai, China, with three alumni – James Robson (Peterhouse), Douwe de Graaf (St Edmund’s) and George Bourne (Peterhouse) and one current trialist, Camille VanderMeer (Peterhouse) – crowned champions, along with a slate of other impressive performances. Read the full results on the CUBC website.
The starting gun has been fired on The Boat Race 2026 with the staging of the historic Presidents’ Challenge.
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.
