University Boat Race 2012: a futile protest that was dead in the water In the aftermath of the dramatic events during Saturday's Boat Race, the eloquent and heartfelt series of messages on Twitter from Oxford crewman Will Zeng to the reckless protester Trenton Oldfield said it all, and are worth repeating. "When I missed your head with my blade," wrote Zeng, "I knew only that you were a swimmer, and if you say you are a protester, then no matter what you say your cause may be, your action speaks too loudly for me to hear you. I know with immediate emotion, exactly what you were protesting. You were protesting the right of 17 young men and one woman to compete fairly and honourably, to demonstrate their hard work and desire in a proud tradition. You were protesting their right to devote years of their lives, their friendships, and their souls to the fair pursuit of the joys and the hardships of sport. You, who would make a mockery of their dedication and their courage, are a mockery of a man. Oldfield, educated at one of Australia's most privileged schools before graduating from the London School of Economics, had decided that the students from two other universities were somehow fair targets for his anger at an "elite society." But for the hard-working young people from Oxford and Cambridge who had balanced their lives between their studies and their love of sport - in particular, taking part in one of the greatest, oldest, and still intensely amateur sporting institutions in the world - his traumatic disruption was a cruel end to their dreams and ideals. And while Oldfield might deplore the high-profile event and deep affection in which it is held by the British public, his protest was misplaced. It was all about egotistical publicity-seeking. Unfortunately, the headlines yesterday and today will be giving him great pleasure. Oldfield may well not appreciate how dangerous his actions were - not only for himself, but also for the competing athletes, stretched as they were to the very extremes of their strength. The sharp-edged, fast-moving blades could have killed him. Or he could have been consumed by the propellers, drag and turbulence caused by the following flotilla of launches. Only the quick thinking of the very people whom he sought to punish saved him. The rowers avoided hitting him with their oars and the launches stopped in time to pull him, smirking idiotically, from the muddy waters. Oxford's bow man Alex Woods ended the race flat on his back, unconscious. His life was put in jeopardy. He is a lightweight rower, just muscle and bone, with a BMI of only 19. With less resilience than his bigger crewmates and opponents, Woods had used up most of his muscle glycogen store in the first 10 minutes of the race. Forced to stop suddenly by Oldfield, he was flip-flopping between aerobic and anaerobic respiration in the half-hour before the race resumed, getting cold, his adrenalin levels pumping. During the restart, his body was running on empty, trying to burn fat that he did not have, his system in metabolic chaos. He remembers nothing after the collision, since his fuel-starved brain had stopped working. It is Woods who gives the lie to Oldfield's assumption that the Boat Race, rowing and Oxford and Cambridge are bastions of elitism and privilege. This 27-year-old went to a fee-paying grammar school in Northern Ireland, before coming to Oxford to train as a doctor. He raced first for his college, then as a lightweight, and last year for the reserves. Against all the odds, he won selection for this year's race after a winter of gruelling testing. He is far from unique. While Eton, Westminster and other public schools were the main source of rowers half a century ago, the sport has spread wide and deep. Of this year's crews, only the two coxes and four of the rowers went to recognised British rowing schools, with a range of overseas schools producing many of the rest. The Boat Race students - and, indeed, the exceptional British rowers who will carry the hopes of millions at the Olympic Games in three months" time - display all the values that Oldfield professes to stand for, but so patently lacks: strength of character, hard work and sacrifice. Still, he has seized his 15 minutes of fame, while admittedly failing to fulfil the deluded ambition, expressed on his blog, to emulate the suffragette Emily Davison, who died under the hooves of the Derby favourite in 1913. The sad truth is that the ultimate legacy of his protest will not be to promote his political views, but to fuel copycat incidents, and increase the likelihood of society becoming ever more security-obsessed and restricted, while leaving us less open, less free and less at ease with ourselves. Daniel Topolski was head coach of Oxford University's Boat Race crew between 1973 and 1987