As a follow-up to my blog on Saturday about the Boat Races I thought I'd do a quick overview of the coverage of yesterday's racing - and my own thoughts about the day.

For me and the women I coach the day began at 9am with an outing on a weirdly quiet and fairly benign Tideway: we had to wait for Cambridge to get on the water for their pre-race outing as their boats were blocking our path, but once on the river there was barely anyone else out. With the tide running out the wind which caused so many issues later in the day wasn't too much of a problem, and we had a great battle-paddling session to Chiswick and back. In Putney, the Cambridge women's coaches were fussing around their boats in standard pre-race coaching behaviour as the security guards had their briefing and the finishing touches were going on decorating the Embankment for the occasion.

A few hours later, amid the wind and hail, the club had filled up with a mixture of partisan Oxbridge alumni and non-partisan rowing fans. Watching the Boat Races with people who know about the sport and the river is always fun; everyone offering their thoughts on the coxing decisions and wondering just how much water Cambridge women could ship before they simply had to stop. We all knew they had pumps on board - we were just wondering why they didn't seem to be working as effectively as Oxford's.

The actual results of the two Blue Boat races were not a surprise. I was hugely impressed with the guts and determination of the Cambridge women as they kept on rowing despite being basically underwater; I was once in an 8 which got swamped and then sank and we were barely managing to paddle, let alone race. The way the crew, wrapped in space blankets, all gathered around their president for the always-horrible post-race interview was immensely moving and you couldn't help but feel for them.

I was also impressed with Morgan Baynham-Williams of Oxford for her apparently-crazy, race-winning decision to tuck into Middlesex after the Chiswick Steps crossover and thus avoid Cambridge's fate (although I think Oxford would have won anyway). On the men's side, Cambridge coped better with the waves and rowed more neatly but the Oxford crew were much closer than pre-race fixtures suggested.

And so the coverage ...

The BBC show was fairly standard. I liked the segments about rowing more generally and they mixed it up pretty well for both rowers and non-rowers alike. However they definitely need to scrap the segments from the pubs - not just because "comedian" Seann Walsh was indeed both offensive and incompetent, but because it detracts from the actual sport. The commentary was solid and the coverage, I thought, generally pretty even between the men's race and women's race on the whole.

The press coverage is also reasonably even. I thought that after the excitement of last year's historic first women's race on the Tideway the focus would go back to the men, but actually many of the articles and even the headlines manage to find a balance between the two races - or there are simply two news stories online, one for each race. That is extremely encouraging.

That said, I haven't seen any actual print copies of the papers save for glancing at e-edition thumbnails online and the BBC's wrap-up of front pages. Those suggest that the Cambridge women have been featured heavily as the front-page image in several papers, but the sports coverage leads with the men. Hilariously, The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph all went with a picture of Cambridge nearly sinking with the caption "That sinking feeling".

But a note of less optimism: I would have been interested to see the coverage if we'd had another day of good conditions like last year. Cambridge's swamping stole a lot of the headlines, and I'd have been surprised if, given a fairly boring choice between a picture of Oxford's women winning or Cambridge's men winning, the papers would have gone with the latter. Personally in that situation I'd have picked a shot of the CUBC and OUWBC crews throwing their coxes into the river in perfect sync and camaraderie. Overall, all four clubs were great ambassadors for our sport yesterday and it was definitely one of the more dramatic Boat Race days of recent memory, and thoroughly endorsed the benefits of having the women racing on the same day as the men.