Everything you need to know about one of sport's most gruelling rivalries

In the late 1820s, friends Charles Merivale of St John’s, Cambridge, and Charles Wordsworth (nephew of William) of Christ Church College, Oxford, went rowing on the River Cam. The outing inspired them to found a competition and, in February 1829, the Cambridge University Boat Club sent a letter to ‘hereby challenge the University of Oxford to row a match... each in an eight-oared boat during the ensuing Easter vacation’.

The inaugural Men’s Boat Race, at Henley-on-Thames in June 1829, was won by Oxford (with ‘ease’). The Cambridge crew wore duck egg blue; Oxford wore navy — a tradition which is upheld today.

In 1845, the race moved to the current Championship Course, a 6.8km (about 4.2 miles) stretch between Putney and Mortlake on the River Thames. Races are typically rowed upstream on a flood tide from Putney to Mortlake — apart from in 1846, 1856 and 1863, when the course ran in reverse, from Mortlake to Putney.

The first Women's Boat Race occurred in 1927 — a full half century before women's rowing was introduced into the Olympic Games. At the beginning, the two female crews were not allowed to race side-by-side and were instead judged independently on a time and style basis.

The country's two oldest universities have been trying to out-do each other for centuries — Oxford was founded in 1096; Cambridge in 1209 — but the only rivalry that runs deeper than the one between them is the one among their own students. More than 100 of them — all enrolled in full-time studied — compete for a place; this year six Paris Olympians rank among the final 16. The coxswain, the ninth member of the eight boats, is the only one who doesn't row and faces forward. They can be male or female, but must weigh a minimum of 55kg for the Men's Race and 50kg for the Women's.

(A fun fact: the Race's influence extends far beyond sport and in orthopaedic surgery, an S-shaped incision along the crease of the elbow is commonly referred to as ‘a boat-race incision’ because it resembles the course.)

The record time held in the Men’s Boat Race is 16min, 19sec, set by Cambridge in 1998; in the Women's it is 18min 33sec by the same University, in 2017. (Cambridge has a total of 87 victories versus Oxford's 81). It is roughly the same amount of time it would take the average person to walk from the centre of London Waterloo station to The Savoy hotel on the Strand.

Last year, luxury French fashion house Chanel was announced as the official timekeeper and title sponsor — the brand's first foray in sporting sponsorship. The competition, now titled The Chanel J12 Boat Race, will be held this weekend, on April 13, with more than 250,000 spectators expected to line the Thames and a further predicted global audience of around 100million.