No Bermudian athlete can have performed in front of an audience such as this, certainly not in terms of live spectators.

As Shelley Pearson and her Oxford University crewmates powered their way down the Thames on a historic day for the Newton Women’s Boat Race, they were roared on by an estimated crowd of 300,000.

Sir Matthew Pinsent, the Olympian, BBC commentator, race umpire and former Oxford oarsman, said that in his 25 years with the race he had never seen so many people lining the riverbanks from Putney to Mortlake.

Millions more were watching on television — the Boat Race normally draws eight million viewers in Britain, but the debut for the women’s race on the same gruelling course as the men will surely have given that a spike — as Oxford won by more than 20 seconds, or 6½ lengths, for their seventh win in the past eight.

The others were all on the straight, two-kilometre course at Henley-on-Thames, watched by 100 or so friends and family — and the odd curious duck.

The decision to move the women’s race to the testing and often cruel Tideway, with its 6.8km of winding, tidal waterway, provided a much greater challenge, yet Pearson, in the No 3 seat, only ever trailed her opposite number in the Cambridge crew by a few feet and that was just in the opening skirmishes off the start.

With Caryn Davies, Oxford’s stroke who has won two Olympic gold medals for the United States eight, setting an aggressive rhythm, Oxford began to pull away.

They had a lead of clear water before the end of the boathouses in Putney and were five seconds up by the Mile Post, a quarter of the way down the course.

It meant that Jennifer Ehr, their cox, could move across in front of Cambridge and seek the faster stream.

Afterwards, Pearson, 23, was all giggles, the thrill of victory outdoing any exhaustion. “It was very exciting,” she said. “We had a race plan, we knew exactly what we needed to do, and that went pretty well.

There were some heavy gusts that were challenging, but we managed it.”

Crossing the line as the first women’s Boat Race crew to win at Mortlake was, she said, “the release of everything we had worked for”.

This was the 70th women’s race and the battle to put them on equal terms with the men — in funding and training facilities as well as race-day prestige — has been many years in coming.

Even though Oxford had the race well won, Ehr made a shout near the end of “one big push for everyone who got us here”. Oxford’s winning time of 19min 45sec was much faster than the organisers had expected and a second faster than the winning men’s time in 1962.

Pearson praised her crewmates: five Britons, two Americans and a Swiss aged between 19 and 32. “They are an incredible group of women from such a diverse range of backgrounds,” she said. “They came together to create a personality in the boat that did what it did today.”

Despite a fine rowing pedigree from studying at Harvard, Pearson was not sure she would make the boat when she arrived last September for her one-year Master’s course in child development and education.

She has an aneurysmal cyst in her pelvis, which has needed nine operations. Pearson could be staying in Britain, having applied to study for another year at Oxford.

Once you’ve got a taste for the Boat Race it is hard to give up.

Oxford also won the men’s race, by a similarly commanding margin, although for the first eight minutes there was a classic side-by-side battle as Ian Middleton, Cambridge’s cox, pursued an aggressive line to restrict Oxford’s advantage on the first bend. Shortly after Hammersmith Bridge, though, Oxford put the foot down and grabbed a clear lead in the blink of an eye, going on to win by 19 seconds.

It was a fourth successive win for Constantine Louloudis, their stroke man and president, who after sitting his final exams will be joining the Great Britain squad in training for his second Olympic Games.

It was also a thirteenth win for Sean Bowden, the Oxford head coach, taking him past the record he shared with the great Dan Topolski.

• Patrick Kidd has been covering the Boat Race for The Times of London since 2006