Hushered? Cry me a river.

Super Bowl LVIII was seen and heard live by more than 123 million people on Sunday. It was pretty impressive, at least until some stutters at halftime. Usher was drowned out, his microphone popped, and the sound levels were low. It got better. The show rolls out onto the pitch within a few minutes; it's a risky endeavor but it shouldn't be that hard to be heard in 2024. Football and its halftime show have some very useful characteristics for broadcasting. Everything happens inside one big rectangle. The space above and on either side can take hundreds of high-resolution cameras on high wires and train tracks that get us in there without interfering with the action. Microphones and radio antenna are small and portable enough to fit on the referee, umpires, and Usher and his friends.

Every Super Bowl has been televised. Not so the Boat Race, the annual contest between eight-person crews from Oxford and Cambridge University.

The 168th race takes place next month on a 4.2 mile stretch of the Thames between Putney and Mortlake. Oxford and Cambridge are the finalists, always the finalists. It's a grudge match, not a tournament. The first men's boats raced in 1829 and they've competed every year since 1856, only interrupted by two world wars and COVID. The next will be #BoatRaceCLXVII.

It's a huge spectator event; thousands line the course to cheer and drink. The race will be done in about 19 minutes, the drinking won't. It's all part of the tradition; P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster?was "rather apt to?let myself go a bit" on Boat Race night.

The 1927 Boat Race was the first with live commentary. Cricket and tennis were already covered live on radio, but the commentators could sit in a glass box - "the greenhouse" - to shut out crowd noise. And, of course, the players weren't in constant motion down the middle of a tidal river, traveling at 15 miles per hour.

These were the initial Boat Race design constraints:

1. The commentators had to be moving at the same pace as the crews from beginning to end.
2. The banks were too crowded for commentators to follow the race from anywhere but on the river.
3. No moving pictures. Television wasn't ready yet. So no commentating from a live TV feed; no replays or close-ups. If the commentators didn't see it, listeners didn't hear it.
4. All the equipment had to fit in a boat. The first microphone John Snagge, who would commentate every race from 1931 to 1980, used at the BBC was the "meat safe". It rolled around on squeaky wheels under four mahogany legs, and its magnet was so powerful, "if you got too close to it, it would paralyze your watch." The boat race had to wait for the technology to slim down, if only a little.

In 1927 the BBC felt ready to give it a go. Their motorized boat would follow in the wake of the crews, carrying more than a hundred pounds of batteries, a power generator, a Reisz carbon button microphone and, of course, the first commentators.

John Snagge covered his first race live from the middle of the river in 1931. All being well, receiving stations at intervals along the course would relay his commentary to Broadcasting House, then on to BBC listeners, but there was no two-way communication, no feedback. He started speaking at noon. but had no idea if listeners were hearing him until his launch passed Harrods department store where a BBC engineer was waiting on the roof with a white handkerchief. The waved hankie told Snagge his commentary was getting through.

Technology has redefined some of the design constraints. Television cameras on fixed positions on the banks and on helicopters deliver live pictures so the commentators have come ashore. Some design constraints persist. The crowds still mean that cameras can't stay parallel with the crews all the way. Some limitations are new. The roving aerial coverage is limited because the race's later stages lie under the Heathrow flight path. But there is now enough redundancy in the coverage that we will always get to follow along. An advance on 1949, when John Snagge's launch broke down mid-race. “I don't know who is winning," he told listeners. "It is either Oxford or Cambridge”.

#sportsbroadcasting #superbowlLVIII #audio #rowing #oxforduniversity #cambridgeuniversity