Each December, Oxford and Cambridge race each other across Wimbledon Common. The Gentlemen’s race dates from 1880 and the Ladies’ race from 1976. The host is Thames Hare & Hounds, the oldest cross-country club in the world.
Gentlemen’s 1880 · Ladies’ 1976 · Old Blues’
The University Cross Country Races are the annual match between Oxford University Cross-Country Club (OUCCC) and Cambridge University Hare & Hounds (CUH&H). There are three races on the day: the Gentlemen’s, the Ladies’ and the Old Blues’.
The Gentlemen’s race was first run in 1880. An unofficial women’s race was run in 1975, and the official Ladies’ race has been run since 1976. The Old Blues’ race completes the afternoon and is now in its fourth decade.
It is a team match. The first six runners home for each university score their finishing places, and the lower total wins. A team’s seventh and eighth runners do not score, but every place they take from the other side adds to their opponents’ total. How the scoring works
Photographs from 2025 by Graham Smith Photography.
Oxford run in Dark Blue. The club’s first teams are the Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Blues who race at Roehampton. Its other teams meet Cambridge a week earlier at the II–IVs: the Tortoises and Snails for the men, the Turtles and Sloths for the women, and the open Mob Matches.
Cambridge run in Light Blue. Their Blues meet Oxford at Roehampton, and at the II–IVs the Spartans and Barbarians race for the men, the Cheetahs and Gazelles for the women, alongside the open Mob Matches.
The II–IVs are a separate meeting, held a week before the Blues races and hosted by each university in turn. More about the II–IVs
The oldest cross-country club in the world, and the reason the Races are run at Roehampton.
TH&H began with members of Thames Rowing Club in Putney, who wanted to keep fit once the rowing season ended. After a steeplechase from the Red Lion in Putney in December 1867, the club held its first recognised run on 17 October 1868: a handicap “paper hunt” from the King’s Head at Roehampton. The hares set off laying a trail of paper and the hounds chased them, with a pewter for the first hound to catch each hare.
In February 1877 the club hosted the first championship race between the London paperchase clubs, the start of what became the National Cross Country Championships. Thames won the team race from the King’s Head, and Percy Stenning won the first of his four individual titles.
Oxford and Cambridge took turns to host the race from 1880 to 1895. In 1890 they asked TH&H to stage it over the club’s Roehampton course. That first attempt was a fiasco: the runners lost the paper trail between Coombe Hill and Raynes Park, no race was declared, and it was re-run at Oxford the following February. From 1896 the match moved to the Thames course for good, and Thames courses have been its home ever since, apart from 1926 to 1938 at Horton Kirby and the war years.
The club lost the King’s Head in August 1975 and moved to its present headquarters on the Memorial Playing Fields at Roehampton Vale, where every race now starts and finishes. That was the year before the Ladies’ race was first run on the Common, in 1976.
In December 2021 World Athletics named TH&H as one of seven new recipients of a Heritage Plaque, for its part in the early development of cross-country running.
This site has the details of this year’s Races and the results of every Blues race since 1880. The results come from the Complete Results Record 1880–2024 and the official 2025 results. The history draws on the clubs’ own histories and TH&H’s club history. Photographs are by Graham Smith Photography unless a caption says otherwise.
The site is run by Thames Hare & Hounds.
If you spot a mistake in the record, or have a photo or story from an earlier race, please get in touch.
