Before the 1987 Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge, the Oxford men’s crew, unhappy at the selection policy imposed upon them by their coach, Dan Topolski, staged a mutiny.
The front page news was covered with such clarity and fairness by the Guardian’s rowing correspondent Chris Dodd, who has died aged 83, that the Oxford crew involved subsequently approached him for advice on how they might put across their case to the public. However, with the same impartiality with which he had covered the story, Dodd reluctantly declined to help the young rowers, later recalling that “it would [have been] unethical for me to offer advice … because I was an observer, not a player”.
