ROWING has had its fair share of critics over the years, but nobody has been more scathing than Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher. When taken to the river by Bertrand Russell, his mentor, to watch a fellow philosopher in a rowing race, he commented: “The manner in which we have spent the afternoon is so vile, we ought not to go on living.”

Although Acer Nethercott, a member of the Oxford crew for Sunday’s Aberdeen Asset Management Boat Race, is studying for a doctorate in philosophy and is a fervent disciple of Wittgenstein, he is unperturbed by his hero’s derision. “Wittgenstein was a philosopher of genius but he was also a rather austere character who lived his life in accordance with his philosophical principles,” Nethercott said . “He held the view that sporting activities are inherently frivolous which, to me, implies that he never understood their true meaning.”

Given that Wittgenstein was a Cambridge man, this rates as a decent opening salvo in the verbal rivalry that is traditional in Boat Race week.

Nethercott is an unusual fellow. First and foremost he is a cox, which has to be one of the most anomalous roles in sport. All teams call on different skills from their members, but can there be any starker contrast than that between the diminutive cox and his gangling oarsmen? While the rowers push themselves to the outer limits of cardiovascular exhaustion, the cox sits at the stern of the boat twiddling the rudder strings with his fingertips.

The divergent roles have an obvious impact upon their respective training regimes. The oarsmen endure six months of torture in the build-up to the Boat Race, waking daily before 6am to begin the first of two lung-busting physical sessions. Although the cox is required to be present for these sessions, the most strenuous thing he has to do is press the stopwatch.

Nethercott says that his team-mates are never resentful of his tranquil routine. “Every member of the team understands the role of every other member and so nobody has a problem with the fact that I do not have to do the painful stuff,” he said. “My role on the day is organisational, not physical. I have to motivate the oarsmen (his voice is relayed to his crew via speakers at the feet of each oarsman), steer the boat and make sure that I deal effectively with any unforeseen contingencies that arise on the water.”

The 26-year-old is also unusual in that he attended a comprehensive school — Mark Hall, in Harlow — unlike the majority of the two crews, which are made up of the usual assortment of American graduates and English public schoolboys.

As a state schoolboy, I had been rather intimidated by the public school brigade when at Balliol studying politics, philosophy and economics in the early 1990s. Nethercott has no such inhibitions. “I have simply never been conscious of a cultural divide between the two,” he said.

This ability to fit in has been the key to his success as a cox, culminating in last year’s triumph when he steered the Oxford boat to victory by the narrowest margin in Boat Race history. He combines an easy charm, which has made him popular among his crew, with a quiet authority that has won their respect and trust. These qualities saw him through a tough selection battle with Peter Hackworth, who coxed Oxford to victory in 2002.

Nethercott’s most striking ability is as a brilliant thinker. He sees a number of parallels between philosophy and sport, particularly with regard to the psychology of those who excel in the disciplines. He accepted my contention that sportsmen and philosophers are almost unique in engaging in a systematic process of selfdelusion.

To muster the motivation to complete gruelling training sessions while preparing for competition, sportsmen routinely exaggerate to themselves the significance of the forthcoming event. But in order to come to terms with defeat in the aftermath of that event, the opposite technique is adopted. “In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter?” is a typical mantra used by sportsmen as part of their coping mechanism. In my experience, this continuous cycle of self-deception is emotionally draining and one of the main reasons that so many talented athletes drop out of sport at a young age.

Although self-deception in philosophy may sound like a contradiction, it is no less prevalent. Almost all philosophers find that their analysis leads to some highly unpalatable conclusions about the human condition: doubts about the existence of the external world, for example.

However, Wittgenstein was most unusual in having taken his conclusions seriously, allowing them to affect the way that he lived his life. Most philosophers play a desperate game, pretending to themselves that their depressing conclusions are of merely academic importance. They hold one set of beliefs inside the classroom and a different set outside it, just as sportsmen have different sets of beliefs either side of a competition. They tell you that the College Bar does not really exist and then go in and buy themselves a pint.

David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher whose views marked the high point of philosophical pessimism, summed up this charade with characteristic candour. “I dine, I play a game of backgammon and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I return to my philosophical speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

This aptitude for internal fraudulence is as common among great sportsmen as it is among professional philosophers, which is why Hume would have fitted in had he ever been selected for Team GB. His intellectual expediency would have made him a sports psychologist’s dream. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, would have been their worst nightmare.

• Matthew Syed is the British No 1 and three-times Commonwealth table tennis champion.
  matthew@msyed.freeserve.co.uk