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From Shore boy to river menace: why an Australian crashed the Oxbridge classic

 Julie Robotham

 April 9, 2012 - 3:00AM

 AFTER Trenton Oldfield bobbed up seal-like ina wetsuit and halted the 158-year-old annualboat race between Oxford and Cambridgeuniversities, the Australian's anti-elitistmanifestos rose to the surface just behindhim.

Mr Oldfield, 35, a year 10 dropout from theprominent Sydney boys' private school Shore,left a trail of rich-bashing blog posts andevidence of a 10-year career since his arrivalin London as activist, project manager andstudent - all focused on poverty, socialinequality and decay in inner cities. A graduate of the London School of Economics,he lists among his preoccupations ''the socio-political history of fences/railings - including when they shifted from keeping things in to

keeping things out''.

On a website titled elitismleadstotyranny , a post under his name - apparently preparedbefore his swim - points out that Chiswick, where he entered the Thames, is ''whereNick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister of thegovernment, lives with his family, despite his constituents living hundreds of miles awayin post-industrial Sheffield''.

Mr Oldfield compared himself to the suffragette Emily Davison - who died after throwingherself under the king's horse in the 1913 Epsom Derby - and then invoked thepossibility of anti-elitist disruption to the Olympics in London this year.

 After Mr Oldfield's stunt, the chairman of the British Olympic Association, ColinMoynihan, said it showed the kind of threat most likely to disrupt the Olympics, whichstart in late July. ''It just takes, and is likely to be, one idiot,'' Lord Moynihan said.

Mr Oldfield's teenage years on Sydney's north shore suggest a more complicatedrejection of the trappings of wealth.

 After Shore he transferred to Bradfield College, a Crows Nest TAFE that was the first toallow students to pursue the HSC while training for a trade. He missed only one thingabout Shore, he told The Sun-Herald in 1994: ''At my old school, if you played sport youbecame a prefect. Bradfield is a lot more geared towards getting students a career.''

Shore was ''mass producing yuppies'', he said, in the parlance of the day. ''I wassuffocating at my old school because the teachers and parents were more interested in

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creating an image - but not my kind of image.''

 Apparently, though, he maintained a relationship with his family, having lived at aHornsby Heights house owned by his father, Ross Oldfield, an engineer and multipleproperty owner, before his departure for Britain in 2001.

Trenton Oldfield has been charged under Britain's Public Order Act and given bail to

appear in court on April 23.

His image now is polarised. For the handful of Twitter commentators who found hisaction admirable, many more derided his privileged background.

Others were angrier at the disruption to the iconic race, which continued in controversywhen an Oxford rower broke an oar in the rerun, handing Cambridge victory. Onewrote: ''I am not even remotely interested in the boat race … But I really really dislikeTrenton Oldfield for what he did.''

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