‘Boat race’ is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘face’. It is a straightforward example of the form: the phrase rhymes with the word it stands in for, and once the pattern is understood the two are used interchangeably, so someone might talk about a person’s ‘boat race’ when they simply mean their face. As is typical of this kind of slang, the phrase is sometimes shortened further, to ‘boat’, though this is less common than the full form.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘boat race’?
The mechanism is the standard one for Cockney rhyming slang: ‘race’ rhymes with ‘face’, so ‘boat race’ comes to mean ‘face’ by association, and the whole phrase can then stand in for the word it rhymes with. The Free Dictionary’s idioms dictionary confirms this pattern and notes that the usage is primarily British.
The exact date of origin is not well documented. Idiom Origins places the phrase in the 1960s, though it does not point to a specific first printed example, so this should be taken as an approximate period rather than a firm date.
One explanation for why ‘boat race’ in particular came to be chosen, rather than some other rhyme for ‘face’, comes from Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, which suggests a link to the actual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. That annual event on the Thames was a popular outing for working-class East Enders, who would travel out to watch it, and the association between the event and a day out may have helped fix the rhyme in everyday speech. This is a plausible piece of folk etymology rather than a documented fact, but it fits the way rhyming slang often borrows its rhymes from things that were part of ordinary Londoners’ lives.
The phrase reached a wider audience beyond its East End roots in 1979, when the band the Monks had a hit with a song called “Shame about her face”, which played on the rhyming slang meaning. That exposure helped push a piece of local slang into more general recognition, even among people who had no particular connection to London’s Cockney speech.