Showdown on the Thames
Calgary woman will help power Cambridge boat against Oxford
In her first year at the University of Oxford, Toronto’s Emma Lukasiewicz is surrounded by history every day.
“I feel like I’m walking around among castles all the time,” she said.
“The university is really quite special and I feel very fortunate to get to live there. It’s really neat.”
“At Harvard, I thought that there were some very historical traditions. And then I got here and they just got sort of blown out of the water,” she added.
On Sunday, the 24-year-old Lukasiewicz will be part of one of Oxford’s highest-profile traditions when she looks to help Oxford’s women beat Cambridge in the annual Boat Race.
Rowing across from her in the bow of the Cambridge boat will be Calgary’s Ashton Brown, who competed in last year’s race.
While the two women hold similar passports, they’re cut from different cloths.
At 133 pounds, the 5-foot-7 Lukasiewicz — a former lightweight rower — is 45 pounds lighter than the five-foot-eight Brown.
The Cambridge crew averages 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, the same height as Oxford but 10 pounds heavier.
The Boat Race is a big deal in Britain. BBC reported nearly five million TV viewers watched the women’s race last year with the men’s race drawing an audience of 6.2 million.
Some 250,000 watched the race from the banks of the Thames. Lukasiewicz’s parents will be among them Sunday.
It marks the second year that women tackle the same 6.8-kilometre horseshoe-shaped course as the men on the River Thames in west London. In the past, the women competed over a two-kilometre straight course at Henleyon-Thames a week before the men raced.
The women, who go one hour before the men Sunday, started racing in 1927 although there have been some off years.
While Cambridge leads the women’s series 41-29, Oxford has won the last three races and seven of the last eight.
On the men’s side, Cambridge leads Oxford 81-79, although the Dark Blues have held the upper hand recently. Oxford has won the last three men’s races and six of the last eight.
The 27-year-old Brown started rowing seriously at Princeton where she did her undergraduate degree in economics.
Brown, who has a string of degrees, is doing a PhD ( her second) on the role education can play in reducing the transmission of poverty across generations.
Sunday’s Boat Race is now known as the Cancer Research UK race.