Women’s Sport Pioneers: The Women’s Boat Race

And The Times report of the day stated that hordes of angry men headed to the river to shake their fists and yell at the women as they did not see it as a sport they should partake in.

As part of the filming, I met a group of ex-rowers now in their 50s, 60s and 70s to discuss their memories of the Women’s Boat Race. We had a wonderful conversation over a hot cross bun or two, looking at photographs of the big hair and shoulder pads of the Oxbridge crews of the 1970s and 1980s.

One Oxford rower from 1985 brought a photo along that was published in the media of the time. It featured their male cox surrounded by his female crew, all in gowns, mortar boards and fishnet nights (above). The media were apparently fascinated by the idea of a male of smaller stature giving orders to eight women, all about six feet tall. These days it’s fairly standard in the Boat Race to have one gender coxing the other.

One thing that came across to me was the attitude then, which remains the attitude of female athletes from any sport now, when faced with the glaring inequalities between men and women: “we just got on with it”.

In the United States, there was a federal law called title IX passed in 1972 which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education programme or activity. But the women rowers at Yale University were still being treated as second class citizens and decided enough was enough.

In 1976, they stripped off their clothes to reveal title IX , externalacross their backs as they demonstrated to the Yale hierarchy and in a prepared statement told the university: “These are the bodies Yale is exploiting”.

It did the trick. American Daphne Martschenko will be competing for Cambridge next month and told me: “It was a moment that defined history, and shaped the lives of women who were to come afterwards in sport in the United States.

“In terms of what it has done for me personally, it’s opened so many doors, it’s provided so many opportunities.

“It has made it such an honour not to only row for Stanford University but made it a possibility to come here, to row for Cambridge at this historic and monumental time.”

I cannot wait for the Women’s Boat Race in 2015, and it will be an emotional moment for me when the starting flag drops. I will be in the BBC commentary box, and I will be reflecting on my own Boat Race, and on those in the decades before who played their part in the journey to that moment. Fighters, trailblazers, but above all – women.

The Boat Race will be shown on BBC One on 11 April from 16:15 BST.