the Boat Race is old

I was just looking at some history to try and get an appreciation of the scale of the boat race's age. When the first Cambridge-Oxford Boat Race happened, California was a Mexican territory with a population of less than 10,000,  with the Gold rush twenty years distant.  Los Angeles was a small ranching community of about 650.   Leland and Jane Stanford, the founders of my undergraduate university, were 5 and 1 years old, respectively.  My home town of Santa Rosa, didn't even exist; the only European influence came from passing ranchers who grazed their cattle in the valley, and from a small Russian fur-trading post on the nearby coast.  Anyway, the Boat Race is old.