Official Dead Heat Declaration
- When
- 1877 (date of law court meeting unspecified)
- Where
- Law court meeting (location unspecified)
After a subsequent law court meeting with umpire Chitty, the official result was declared a dead heat, despite Oxford's belief they had won and contemporary claims of a five-foot Oxford margin.
Oxford firmly believed they had won the race by feet, but following a subsequent meeting in a law court with representatives of both universities and the umpire Chitty, the official result was declared "Dead Heat". Contemporary accounts claim Phelps himself called it a "dead-heat to Oxford by 5 feet", though the distance varies according to the telling and historian Tim Koch describes such claims as an entrenched lie. Punch declared "Oxford won, Cambridge too."
Sources
- The Boat Race 1877 Wikipedia, revision of 2026-06-06
- The Boat Race Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-03
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.