Last Sunday was the day of the University Boat Races, between Oxford and Cambridge. Full of tradition, it is a gladiatorial contest rowed over nearly 7km of the Thames, with two eights fighting it out for victory. For many, it is anachronistic and irrelevant, and yet it attracts huge interest, typically with more than 250,000 turning out to watch live from the riverbank, and a global TV and radio audience of several hundred million....