Who are Oxford’s sportiest college?

We crunch Blues numbers and come up with some surprising results…


Christ Church's boating Blues - but how did they fare overall?

Christ Church’s boating Blues – but how did they fare overall?

We all know that some colleges are just plain better at sports than others.

On the one hand, you’ve got places who seem to just be sporting factories: Teddy Hall and Keble are always up there with rugby, Worcester have a stranglehold on football, Christ Church love their rowing. On the other hand, you’ve got colleges so dismal that they can’t even field their own teams. Looking at you, “Merton/Mansfield College”.

We wanted to answer the question: who were Oxford’s best sporting college? We decided to go the top – the Blues. We broke down the numbers, the results are in, and the Tab can reveal that…

Key: F: Full Blues, H: Half Blues. Score is Full Blues + (Half Blues/2).

…with 17 Full Blues and 8 Half Blues, for a total of 21, St. Edmund Hall are Oxford’s sportiest college for 2012/13.

Here are a few of the bigger surprises from the results…

  • Hall comfortably lead with 21 points, but then three colleges were clustered close behind: Keble, Christ Church and Magdalen all finished within half a point of each other.
  • Keble produced 12 Women’s Full Blues, as well as 5 Half Blues, but were let down by not a single one of their men receiving a Full Blue – the only undergraduate college to do so. Bad luck, boys…
  • Several teams were able to provide three or more Blues in a single sport, but just one produced four – Tatiana Cutts, Eleanor Jaskowska, Ashley Massey, and Kate Smith, all of Keble, came up with the goods and secured Blues in women’s rugby union.
  • The university boasted five “priest-athletes” from the theological colleges, including two full Blues – Iain Holland in boxing and Augustus Kennedy in hockey.
  • At the other end of the table, the worst college (excluding postgraduate colleges and PPHs) was Oriel – towering Boat Race Blue Malcolm Howard was joined by just one other Full Blue in uni basketball player James Etheridge in addition to a smattering of Half-Blues.
  • Winning the “just not quite there” award are Lincoln, who managed to produce 16 Half Blues in sports ranging from Eton Fives to Yacht to Korfball, but only came out with four Full Blues – good for a meager 12th placed finish.

Water power: Hall boast 17 Full Blues, including 2012 matriculee and one-time Olympic hopeful Xander Alari-Williams

With university sports clubs set to welcome a whole new intake of freshers this week, every college will be waiting to see who they’ll have to feature on the list next year…

Want to write stories, take photos or make videos for the Tab? We’d love to get you involved, email [email protected].