Structure
The races are run in divisions, each containing 17 crews. The number of crews in each bottom division varies yearly depending on new entrants. Each crew contains eight rowers and one coxswain. Unlike the May Bumps, rowers trialling for spaces in university crews are not allowed to take part in the Lents. A total of 121 crews took part in 2012, totalling around 1100 participants. There are currently four divisions for men's crews (referred to as M1, M2 ... M4) and three divisions for women's crews (similarly W1–W3). The divisions represent a total race order with Division 1 at the top. The ultimate aim is to try to finish Head of the River (also said as gaining the 'Headship'), i.e. first position in division 1.
At the start, signalled by a cannon, each crew is separated by a distance of about 1½ boat lengths (approximately 30 m or 90 ft). Once the race has begun, a crew must attempt to catch up with the crew ahead of it and bump (physically touch or overtake it) before the crew behind does the same to them. A crew which bumps or is bumped must pull to the side of the river to allow other crews to continue racing. A crew which neither bumps the crew ahead nor is bumped by the crew behind before crossing the finishing post is said to have rowed over. Any crew which bumps then swaps places with the crew that it bumped in the following day's racing. A crew which rows over stays in the same position. Crews finishing at the top of a division, the sandwich boat, row at the bottom of the next division to try to move up a division. The process is repeated over four days, allowing crews to move up or down in the overall order of boats. The finish order of one year's Lent Bumps is then used as the starting order of the following year's races.
Read more about this topic: Lent Bumps
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“The question is still asked of women: “How do you propose to answer the need for child care?” That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: “If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?””
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)