The Boat Race? No thanks. I can think of better things to do than watch a bunch of poshos rowing higher up the social hierarchy

Sean O’Grady details his hatred for the yearly sporting event. To read the other side of this debate, click here

I have never watched the Boat Race. Not even on television. I certainly haven’t traipsed down to the Thames to join all the braying idiots who seem to congregate for this orgy of self-congratulation.

It is, like most of the social episodes in what I believe is called “The Season”, a sort of folk ritual for the (usually) wealthy and privileged to congratulate themselves. It is, I suppose, an extremely advanced form of conspicuous consumption, because it is not just about quaffing champagne and turning up in a Range Rover but a rare opportunity to display a pure abstract – social superiority (and, more seldom, intellectual prowess). Like when people used to put “BA (Oxon)” on their business cards.

The main function of the Boat Race, in fact, is to offer an annual opportunity for them wot went to Oxbridge to remind anyone who’s interested, or not, about the quality of their education (and much else, of course, as implied by that).

It hardly qualifies as sport, and, from what I’ve heard of it, has suffered from its fair share of minor scandals about (in effect) non-students becoming members of the crew.

Britain tends to do well in international rowing competitions, I realise, because it is one of those sports, like the horsey stuff and the skiing, that isn’t really truly international at all, and if it were then things might be different. There is no rowing team from Kenya.

Indeed, because of the obvious high cost of constructing facilities, rowing is incubated primarily in the British public schools. Anyone who has any doubts about the vast inequalities in educational and associated sporting opportunities in this country need only reflect on the Eton Boating Lake.

It cost some £17m to build, and, if you were in any doubt about the strange generosity shown to the public schools by the state and the quangos, enjoyed another half-a-million quid in grants by Sport England, UK Sport, the Department for Culture Media and Sport and the South East England Development Agency. (Surely, by the way, Berkshire hardly needs much help from a development agency?)

If all this sounds like the bitter outpourings of some class warrior, it is. I wouldn’t make too much of the hapless “Boat Race-ist” who’s emerged in the headlines lately. Benedict Aldous, a 19-year-old Old Etonian, obviously, and an engineering student at Christ Church made the idiotic decision to dress up as Ku Klux Klansman for some fancy dress party.

Yet Mr Aldous stands, or rows, as a kind of exemplar of a certain type, and presents an image of the universities that is off-putting to those who aspire to enter them. It makes too many young people feel that these colleges aren’t really meant for them, and that their class or background would make them feel unwelcome. They’d be right, too.

I invite you, if you do watch the event or take a look at the crew profiles on line, to look at those involved with some “consciousness”. You will then see for yourself that the Boat Race is hideously white. In terms of diversity, it is an embarrassment.

Not all diversity is visible, I’ll grant you, but I would be surprised if the great majority of the crews and reserves crews had not, to put it at its crudest, had their families buy them an unfair advantage in life.

Don’t get me wrong: every parent who has the money to do so has a duty to buy their brats an unfair advantage in life, but that doesn’t make the system that creates such an imperative any the more acceptable.

Like those questions about Greek mythology on University Challenge, the infamous photo of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, George Osborne et al in the Bullingdon Club rigout, and the whole Brideshead Revisited thing, the Boat Race is a symbol of something deeply unattractive.

To any aspiring child at most state schools, it makes Oxford and Cambridge look even more like alien worlds, as do all the Hogwarts customs and Lord of the Rings-style dons and architecture.

The Boat Race just makes me cringe. It is better sunk.

Sean O’Grady would like to point out that he was a student at Oxford University, but never set foot in a rowing boat