It was with great joy that on a miserable Wednesday morning I at last stumbled upon that holiest of grails: a sport in which McDonald’s is acceptable pre- and post-activity fare.

At the sort of hour I thought only rowers ever saw sober, I joined up with the Oxford University motorsport team as they prepared to head for a routine weekday practice session. In Kent.

Three hours and a sausage and egg McMuffin meal later we rolled up at the track – the sort of compressed, winding go-kart course you might be familiar with from extravagant 13-year-old boys’ birthday parties.

The name ‘Motorsport’ is probably a bit of an oversell, conjuring up visions of multidiscipline, Wacky-Races-cum-Formula-One competitions in which you’re free to choose between your team’s motorbike, rally car or dune buggy depending on track conditions. The truth is a little more mundane – if that’s really a term that can be fairly applied to the impressive fleet of 115 cc Club 100 ‘championship karts’ that the Oxford team race.

Their physics, though generously explained in some detail by the team, seemed to be almost exactly modelled on that of Mario Kart. The best drivers literally jumped into sweeping three-wheeled drift turns, and seemed to have little need for the brake; while the worst, me especially, were forever sending our karts into what were essentially banana-skin-induced spins.

By the time it was my turn to take a ten-minute stint on track I had completely unsettled myself with visions of a 250 mph blowout into the pit lane wall. Fortunately, I had nothing to be quite so worried about. Driving was difficult but utterly exhilarating. These karts are much more sensitive than the ones you might have been tricked into driving on a hazy mid-teenage summer holiday in Portugal, and I found that I was always a slightly over-zealous stamp on the brake away from finding myself facing the wrong way with four or five karts storming impatiently towards me.

As a result, buzzwords like ‘understeer’, ‘racing line’ and ‘braking zone’ all of a sudden began to make sense in a context outside of the relatively charmed worlds of Top Gear and Gran Turismo 3. I soon became incredibly jealous of the skill of the more experienced drivers, who flew effortlessly past me at worryingly brief intervals. But even I could hold  my own on the home straight – a thrilling full-throttle drag which took the karts up to around 65 mph.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is of its nature bound to be a genuine minority sport, with decent facilities relatively sparse and expensive to use. But, tucking into my Big Mac meal as we made our way back to Oxford via Bayford McDonald’s, I couldn’t help but feel that the seven regulars I accompanied were on to something. For pure adrenaline value this must rank near the top of the list of Oxford sports – and with Cuppers in a couple of weeks, maybe now’s the chance for a few new drivers to take the wheel.

Last Friday had the potential to be one of the most exciting days in the Oxford sporting calendar so far, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Those who took the time out of their busy schedules to watch some of Oxford’s finest athletes ply their trade were treated to four cracking XChanging Cuppers ties, with the prospect of two mouth-watering semi-finals to follow at University Parks on Friday the 15th.

The early kick off saw First Division leaders New travel to Second Division outfit Pembroke, and they needed a late brace from Sam Donald to see them safely through to the next round with a 2-1 win. New’s attacking midfielder Edd Hermes outlined what it means to be that one step closer to the final: ‘Everyone dreams of Iffley. Even the most unlikely hipster, clambering into bed after a long night of looking miserable at BabyLove, having not played a single minute of sport during his 3 years at Oxford, dreams of Iffley. Every Blues badminton player, every member of Oxford Anime Society, every extra in every low budget, University dramatic production, dreams of Iffley.’  He added, ‘We are no different. The difference lies in the fact that we, as a group of young men have the chance to make this dream a reality. Heavens gates are in sight, we’re being beckoned in. Just one last giant, fairly attractive, lake possessing behemoth stands in the way.’

That ‘behemoth’ comes in the form of Worcester, who dispatched lower league opposition in the form of Trinity after extra time. Two goals from player of the round Julian Austin were enough to see the Premier Division side through, but for much of the game it looked like a shock may have been on the cards. Worcester will be hoping that their Cuppers run translates into league form, as they push for the title in Oxford’s top division, while Trinity will feel that their gutsy performances shows they have the ability to push on and secure promotion to Division 1. The Worcester College twitter account has proclaimed the semi-final a ‘clash of the titans’, and it seems hard to disagree.

The other of Friday’s semi-finals will see Wadham take on Turl Street outfit Lincoln, who came through an extremely tight affair with Teddy Hall to emerge victorious after the proverbial lottery of the penalty shootout. Goals from Lincoln’s Nathan Riddell and Teddy Hall’s Edward Mole had left the two sides, only 6 places apart in the league ladder, inseparable after 120 minutes, with the strength of both defences the prominent feature of the game. Both teams had chances to win the game, and Lincoln’s captain Alex West was delighted to make it through eventually: “We’re really looking forward to the semi final, and whilst we have already beaten Wadham this year in the Premier League, we can’t let this go to our heads. It will undoubtedly be a big test, but one I feel we as a team have the quality to overcome. If we play the way I know we can then we will hopefully be back at Iffley road after too long of an absence.”

Wadham overcame second division Christ Church to book their place at University Parks on Friday, with a margin of victory that was probably no surprise to either side. Christ Church were hoping that the magic of the cup would see them pull of a Luton-like cup upset against a side who have had a mixed season in the top flight, but they had no answer to Wadham’s attacking prowess and two goals apiece for Chris Wright and Jez Stothart saw the away side on their way to a 4-2 victory, meaning that the St Aldate’s side will now need to focus on their Division 2 campaign.

As has been the case all season, we must certainly expect the unexpected when it comes to Friday’s ties. For a betting man, the Cuppers semi-finals seem a sure fire way to lose a lot of money, but perhaps we should look to New College’s match-week exploits as a means to predict the results. They’re  spending the week attempting to create the Worcester team on FIFA, then playing them with their own created team, and looking for areas to exploit. The job is a meticulous one and much work is clearly being neglected in the process, but you can’t help but feel this might just give them the mental edge in their upcoming contest. For them it’s a worthwhile experience, and we can be sure that across Oxford, the prospect of a Cuppers Final is washing away any 5^th week blues that our sport starts might be experiencing.

If your appetite needed to be whet any further, the last resounding words from New College’s Press Officer should do the trick: ‘We love footie. We love cuppers. We’re ready.’

Are you?

An important part of sport’s appeal is the fascination we take in watching the breathtaking and incredible feats that the human body can undertake in order to achieve. Those moments that capture our imagination and leave us speechless are those that we didn’t even know were possible. The Paralympics of 2012 in particular reminded us of this. But even in this group of athletes, the story of David Smith stands out as truly inspirational. The gold medallist in the rowing mixed coxed four has lived a life and career that in itself seems unbelievable.

Smith was born with a condition known as congenital talipes equinovarus, commonly known as ‘club foot’, in both of his feet. This significantly hampered his development. “I had to learn to walk in special plaster cast boots until the age of three. It left my right foot slightly deformed and fused. That had caused lots of problems as a kid playing sport as all my attention was always going to that.” However, determined not to let this hold him back, Smith overcame his issues to represent Great Britain at karate at the tender age of 15, and also competed in both Skiing and Athletics at a regional level. In each, he was competing in regular competition against able-bodied individuals.

Even relatively recently, Smith’s focus was not on rowing; he put all his efforts into bobsleighing, reaching the top four in the UK for his position as brakeman, and strived to become one of the best in the world. His regret at not quite making the grade is still evident. “Rowing came later in life for me. I was on the bobsleigh team in the Olympic squad and missed out on the 2006 Winter Olympics by a couple of hundredths of a second, but was having all sorts of injury problems that held me back from competing regularly on the world stage.”

It was these injuries that would prevent him from competing further in the sport. “I was going to a physio at the time, who said to me, ‘You’re not going to be able to compete at this level in bobsleigh. You are never going to be able to compete in sport again. Your body is just shutting down.’ That was a pretty heartbreaking moment, because that was 2008, so I wasn’t ready to give up mentally or physically, I still wanted to compete.”

After this disappointment, Smith was still not ready to give up on his dreams as a sportsman. “My whole life I’ve always wanted to be an athlete, but I’ve been held back with the tumour, held back with my foot. I’d come so close on so many occasions, in karate, in athletics, in skiing, in bobsleigh. I just never felt I got to really fulfil my potential as I thought I could, without all of these things holding me back.” Smith felt he had more to get out of sport.

With this burning desire still evident, Smith took a different avenue for his sporting endeavours. “On advice by my physio, a classifier for the BPA [British Paralympic Association], I went to the talent ID day just see what it was all about. I love sport, I love competing, and to compete in a home games was going to be something else.” It was obvious to the selectors that Smith had serious potential in rowing. “I jumped on an erg for the first time in my life, and did a 1000m row. I came pretty close to breaking three minutes, and was told that was a pretty respectable time for someone who has never done any endurance training. British Rowing got in touch with me and asked me to come down to another day in Aversham, and then I made it onto the Paralympic squad.”

But another catastrophic setback occurred in May 2010 that threatened once more to end his sporting life. “I was sent for a routine MRI scan by the BPA. It came back with the result that there was a tumour the size of a tennis ball growing inside my spinal cord at my neck.”

In an attempt to save his sporting career – and more importantly his life – Smith sought help within the rowing community in Oxford. “This is when the real Oxford connection comes in, as it was an ex-Oxford rower that did my surgery. I went up to Richard Budget who is the British Olympic doctor and an ex-Olympic rower himself. He rang Tom Cadoux-Hudson, who’s a surgeon in Oxford and also lectures at Oxford University.”

The surgery was far from straightforward, with near-fatal implications in itself. “The confusion with the surgery is that because the tumour had been there so long, when he took that out there was a massive rush of blood to the spinal cord. That tumour had been pressing on my neck for so long it had damaged my entire nervous system throughout my body. So when they took it out I ended up with a massive blood clot in my neck. I woke up completely paralysed from the neck down. And that involved another emergency surgery on the neck.”

For someone so active and for whom sport is such a great part of his life, this was a staggeringly quick life change that was hard to take. “I went from being an Olympic bobsleigher to basically being in a wheelchair. I spent a month in hospital, I lost three stone in weight, I couldn’t even stand up, and had to completely learn to walk again. It’s all such a blur to me.” His phenomenal recovery, culminating in winning a Paralympic Gold seems impossible to Smith himself. “I forget now that I’ve been through all the surgery. I look back and think ‘God I’m not sure I could do that again.’ My mind almost blocked out my knowledge of my body. I have one goal, one target.”

Smith’s immense drive was shown in his entire dedication and focus on returning to rowing, instead of on survival. “Every day, seven days a week, I couldn’t row, I couldn’t train. So I would lie in bed and visualise training sessions. I think the mind is such a powerful machine, if I visualise then my body will respond, on a hormonal level if not on a physical level. I decided to do as much as possible, and I think that played a key role [for my recovery].”

Even once he was able to walk again, getting back into rowing was no mean feat. “Rowing, even when you are fully fit, is probably one of the hardest sports in the world. Before we were doing 16km ergs, and now I couldn’t even do five minutes.” And it was far from just the physical pain that he was experiencing. “I just kept pushing myself and going through that mental and emotional pain of looking in the mirror.” Smith needed to rebuild himself in every sense of the word.

Fast forward 14 short months since the operation, and incredibly Smith was standing on the podium at the World Championships with a gold medal around his neck. With no time to celebrate, training moved on as the Olympics loomed large. And by the time London came, Smith felt as if nothing was going to get in his way. “I think I’d been through so much, by the time I got to the starting line in London, nothing mattered, I was just so focused on crossing that line in first place. It was a massive team effort to get me there, it was not just the guys in the boat but everyone at GB Rowing.”

“I thought to myself: ‘I’ve put my body in so much pain in the last two years to make London, there is no way I want to leave with anything but gold. Everyone around the world who is going [to the Paralympics] is going to be hurting, but if I could hurt myself a little bit more, just push a little bit harder, that is going to make all the difference.’ As a team we went there to win, but on a personal note, it would close the door on the nineteen years of problems in sport.”

The mixed coxed four of Smith, Pam Relph, Naomi Riches, James Roe, and cox Lily van den Broecke, won gold for GB in the final race of the London 2012 Games at Eton Dorney. The coxed four overhauled Germany (who had set a new World Best Time in the qualifiers) in the second half of the race in dramatic fashion to win by just 2.06 seconds.

Like many of the Olympians, the realisation of what had been achieved is still a little lost on Smith. “Even now I come home and think ‘God did that all really happen.’ It still feels like it’s a bit of a dream and someone’s going to pinch you and say, ‘it’s race day again, we’ve got to go.’ It feels like the past six months haven’t happened.”

However, the race would prove to be a final flourish in a short rowing career for Smith. “It was my health that made me give up the sport; I would have loved to have stayed as a rower. But the damage to my arm from surgery and my neck problems – the strain that rowing was putting on my body was just too much.”

Not content with his Paralympic Gold, Smith hunted for the next challenge to quench his endless ambition. Cycling around the world in 2013 became the next mammoth task that he decided to take on. “This cycle thing started to grow on me and I thought I needed a challenge that didn’t involve competitive sport, but still pushed the mind and the body.” But Smith hasn’t given up on competitive sport just yet: “I’ve got dreams to go to Rio as well, and I would love this dream to come true. But my body took a real beating crossing that line in London and I’m still recovering.”

It is clear that whatever the future holds, sport will continue to be at the heart of Smith’s life: “I’ve said before that sport saved my life, and I truly believe that. I always see life as a row of hurdles. And if you look down a row of hurdles on an athletics track most people would perceive it as a threat, and think I’ll never be able to jump these. But if you ask a top Olympic hurdler, they’ll perceive it as challenge. I think there is a lot in the psychology of that. I had such a passion to achieve in sport that all the hurdles that were put in front of me I saw as challenges, and I’ll never give up.”

There must be very few other stories that can match the inspiration of Smith’s struggle to constantly pick himself up from serious setbacks to compete at the highest level for his country, across a multitude of disciplines. There is a satisfying closure brought by his gold medal in London, a vindication for this fighting spirit; but it is testament to his character that he has quickly set even more difficult goals in the hope of challenging himself. David Smith is a man who never wants to live in his comfort zone.

On Saturday, Oxford’s top swimmers returned for the first time to the scene of their 2011 Varsity defeat, in which Cambridge snatched overall victory by the finest of margins in the final race of the meet. Yet having responded in emphatic style in Oxford at the Rosenblatt pool last year with Oxford’s greatest margin of dominance in history, OUSC well and truly consolidated their revenge by smashing the record margin yet again with a 117-63 final score, just short of the maximum possible difference of 126-54.

The competition started as it was to continue for the Dark Blues with 1-2 finishes in both the women’s and men’s 200m Individual Medley as Naomi Vides, Rachel Andvig, President Tom Booth and Xander Alari-Williams demonstrated Oxford’s superior all-round ability. The subsequent race saw Cambridge seal their first – and ultimately last – victory of the meet, as they put both of their strongest swimmers in the women’s 100m backstroke, gaining maximum points.

From then on Oxford’s domination was more or less complete as Oxford notched up five consecutive 1-2 finishes in the men’s events. The Dark Blues fared almost as well in the corresponding women’s events, taking 1-2s in both the 200m and the 400m freestyle as well as second and third in the 100m butterfly.

One of the more emphatic 1-2s of the day came in the women’s 100m breaststroke, as Naomi Vides and Ellie Berryman-Athey crushed their opponents. Vides, who was named swimmer of the meet for her wins and meet records in both the 200IM and 100 breast, was quick to acknowledge the overall level of team performance: “It was one of those things where everything comes together at the right time in the right way and I was so honoured to be awarded swimmer of the meet especially with such great performances from the rest of the team.”

The men followed with a victory and club record for Teddy Hall fresher Xander Alari-Williams and a strong third place finish from Anthony O’Driscoll.

The final individual events of the meet comprised two big rivalries, with Rachel Andvig up against Cambridge’s Meg Connor and Tom Booth against big-man Dale Waterhouse in the 100m freestyle. Oxford came out victorious in both, with Booth’s win leaving him unbeaten by any light blue in an individual for four years, across five different events. This incredible personal accomplishment doubled up as the final nail in the Cambridge coffin, ensuring that Oxford took an unassailable 89-51 lead into the relay races. However, even with victory already sealed, the Dark Blues did not let up. The women produced a devastating performance in the medley relay, sealing victory by several body lengths. The men unleashed a similar performance, as O’Driscoll opened up a 5-second lead after the backstroke leg and the Oxford quartet never looked back. The meet ended in emphatic fashion as the women’s freestyle team won in club record time, and the men followed suit with a comfortable final victory.