The Vesta Veterans International Eights Head of the River Race is a rowing race held annually on the River Thames over the Championship Course. The direction in which the event is raced changes from year to year, dependent on the time of the tides: some years it is raced from Mortlake to Putney other years it will go the other way. It is open to veteran (also known as masters) eights, who race in categories determined by the average ages of the eight rowers. The race always takes place on the day following the Head of the River Race.
It is organised by Vesta Rowing Club.
Famous quotes containing the words veterans, eights, head, river and/or race:
“[Veterans] feel disappointed, not about the 1914-1918 war but about this war. They liked that war, it was a nice war, a real war a regular war, a commenced war and an ended war. It was a war, and veterans like a war to be a war. They do.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“... but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In order to get to East Russet you take the Vermont Central as far as Twitchell’s Falls and change there for Torpid River Junction, where a spur line takes you right into Gormley. At Gormley you are met by a buckboard which takes you back to Torpid River Junction again.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“On fields all drenched with blood he made his record in war, abstained from lawless violence when left on the plantation, and received his freedom in peace with moderation. But he holds in this Republic the position of an alien race among a people impatient of a rival. And in the eyes of some it seems that no valor redeems him, no social advancement nor individual development wipes off the ban which clings to him.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)