Reg Little looks back on the contribution to Oxford University life by Dan Topolski

His family asked for a private funeral. But in the early summer many of the Oxford University sportsmen and sportswomen who rowed for Daniel Topolski, and others who wished they had, will be given the chance to celebrate one of the most remarkable figures in the Boat Race’s 186-year history.

For if Sir Roger Bannister is the name that springs to mind when people think about athletics in Oxford, Dan Topolski, along with the four-time Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent, are the ones readily recalled when it comes to rowing.

It is understood a memorial service is planned to take place in London probably around the time of the Henley Royal Regatta for Topolski, the former Oxford University rowing coach who died on February 21 aged 69.

Those attending from the worlds of sport and journalism will no doubt share their stories about the charismatic coach, who led the Dark Blues to an unprecedented 10 straight wins in the Boat Race between 1976 and 1985.

There will be those who recall Topolski, the cool, fashion-conscious and long-haired Bohemian from the sixties, who won a place in the Oxford Boat after coming up to read geography at New College.

There will be jokes about how as an undergraduate he majored in partying alongside rowing. Even his fourth-class degree passed into legend, with it said to be the last one awarded by the university for geography.

Comparatively light in weight, he kept bigger rowers out of the Boat Race crew by his tenacity and will to win.

“When he’s in, the boat goes faster,” came the simple reply when one of the coaches, Hugh ‘Jumbo’ Edwards, was asked to explain his inclusion.

Others at the memorial will share stories about Topolski the Oxford coach for 15 years until 1987.

It is sometimes said that with the possible exception of an Olympic marathon or a world boxing championship, the race between the Dark and Light Blues represents the harshest struggle in any sport.

Many of the tributes written since his death suggested that Topolski was a natural at coaching, with an uncompromising style, and a man who instilled in his crews the mental intensity of gladiators.

That certainly was not how it seemed to his old friend, the best-selling author Patrick Robinson, who met him back in 1966.

“He swore to God that he once told me that Oxford were rowing with special oars with holes in the blades to cut down water resistance. And that I printed it.

“Dan went on to row twice in the Boat Race for Oxford, winning once, and became a writer and travel photo-journalist, a world champion oarsman and Olympic coach. He also became the most successful Oxford coach of all time, which was something of a surprise to me.

“Dan had never seemed the sort of man destined to become a drill sergeant of the river. With his long hair, his charm, his bon viveur life-style and beautiful girlfriends, his penchant for rough travelling in far-flung exotic places, always struck me as being more at home in expensive King’s Road restaurants than a gymnasium. But I was wrong.”

Proving people wrong proved to be something of a speciality, and never more so than after the notorious Oxford Mutiny in the harsh winter of 1986/7, which has passed into Boat Race history as possibly the greatest victory of them all.

The story of how Oxford University Boat Club was brought to its knees when the star American members of the Oxford crew walked out, refusing to row under Topolski’s direction, made headline news around the world. It was a story that had everything: betrayal, heroism and the conflict between Oxford tradition and American big-star sportsmanship.

Topolski had been continually humiliated by the Americans, who regarded him as a demonic martinet with outdated techniques. They had also objected to the inclusions in the crew of Donald Macdonald, president of the Oxford University Boat Club, who had left his insurance job in Stockton to follow his dream of rowing for Oxford University.

For the coach, the most bitter moment came at the university boathouse, when he was left alone at the riverside by a crew who simply refused to work with him.

Oxford Mail:
During the filming of Oxford Blues in 1996, the real Dan Topolski shouts orders to American actors in the film

“They did not want to train. They were good athletes who underestimated the training requirements for the Boat Race, which is extraordinarily difficult, and the rough and tumble and unpredictable sort of race,” he had told me.

He went on to recall how on a bleak, rainswept Thursday night, with just nine days left before the race and no semblance of morale left in the Oxford crew, he began to draw up a plan to win the Boat Race.

The plan involved taking the brave decision to revert to wooden oars, a brilliant move given the rough conditions of the race day, and getting back to basics.

“I operated on instinct. I went back to what I knew,” he would recall. I was answering to no one. All my decisions were being made on the run. It was me against the world and I knew exactly what I was doing. I had endured enough bullshit over six months to sink the QEII.”

He would take ill-concealed pleasure that while his makeshift crew went on to win one of the greatest and most unexpected victories in Boat Race history, his American friends went back to the US to disappear without trace in most cases.

His book about the affair, True Blue, won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, being less successfully turned into a film that never came close to fulfilling its billing as “the next Chariots of Fire”.

Off the water he went on to thrive as a journalist forming a fine partnership on the BBC rowing coverage with Garry Herbert.

“I lost my wing man,” said Herbert on news of Topolski’s death. “None like him, one of a kind, one of the good guys.”

Sir Steve Redgrave led the tributes. “Rowing will miss him dearly and so will I. Dan was a good friend and a rowing man through and through.”

Matthew Pinsent added on Twitter: “RIP Dan Topolski Oxford Blue, world champion, Oxford coach, Henley Steward. What a pleasure to share our sport with him.”

In his later years Topolski continued to share his knowledge of the Thames with Oxford crews. But then he had watched his first race at the age of seven, when his mother, the actress Marian Everall, held him up by the window of a house in Chiswick to watch the Boat Race.

“There is nothing in the world like it,” I recall him saying as he rose from our interview in an Abingdon Road pub. There was certainly nothing in world of rowing quite like Dan Topolski.