Varsity Crew Bows To Olypmic Champs

If you see am elderly, respectable looking gentleman walking around with his head buried in his hands this week, it's probably an official of the Harvard Department of Athletics.

And if you should, by chance, see such a person and wish to console him, be sure that in the course of your conversation you under no circumstances mention the word "crew".

It was a disappointing weekend for Harvard towers and in some ways, a very embarrassing one. The Crimson's varsity eight had appeared on the cover of Sports illustrated June 22, and the cover picture was captioned "Coach Harry Parker and the World's Best Crew."

The Crimson may be the World's Best Crew still, but no one is saying go today. In the very first round of Henley's Grand Challenge Regatta, the eight ran into Vesper's Olympic championship crew, five of whom had been in the boat that best Harvard by two lengths in the Olympic Trials last year. And Vesper repeated the triumph over the Henley distance, this time with the margin shaved to two-thirds of a length.

And in this regatta, even Vesper wasn't good enough to go all the way. Germany's Ratzeburg crew, second to Vesper by a few feet in the Olympic, got its revenge with a half-length victory in the finals. Ratzeburg's 6:16 for the mile and- five-sixteenths broke by two seconds the course record that Vesper had set in beating the Harvard crew on Thursday.

This wouldn't have been as embarrassing as it was for Harvard-- after all, the Vesper and Ratzeburg crews are older and more experienced than the Crimson--if Harvard officials hadn't acted all spring as if they believed their press clippings. The week before the race coach Harry Parker filled the Boston papers with comments that exuded confidence. "These boys could win pulling an old barge with broomsticks," was Parker's day-of-race bulletin.

The Crimson crew had won every race it had rowed all season and had won them by huge margins. It had broken the Charles record by ten seconds and obliterated the Lake Carnegie (Princeton) record by 20. It has beaten the field in the Eastern sprints by two and a half lengths, a record margin in the 2000-meter race. And it had left Yale ten lengths astern in the four-mile chase down the Thames River in New London.

After the race Parker said he still felt his crew was better and challenged Vesper to show up for the Lucerne Regatta in Switzerland this weekend. Vesper isn't expected to race, but no one is certain.

Parker's crew got off to a two foot lead, understroking Vesper 40 to 42 at the start. But the quarter mile mark was the last time the Philadelphia crew was headed. With a twenty-stroke burst they shot past Harvard and picked up the three-quarters of a length they were never to lose.

It was another story in the final, with Ratzeburg beating Vesper in a contest of power rowing. The Germans went off at an incredible 52 strokes per minute and never dropped under 40 before they sank, exhausted at the finish line. It was several minutes before they could row back to the shore.

Two other Harvard crews lost in the elimination rounds. Eliot House's defending champions went to the semifinals of the Thames Challenge Cup before losing to the Isis Rowing Club of London, which went on to win the title.

Eliot lasted one round longer than Northeastern's crew, the darling of the Boston papers, which dropped a quarter-final race to Cornell's lightweight champions. Northeastern is in its first year of rowing.

A Harvard four-with, cox lost in the quarters to the Tideway Scullers, who lost in turn in the finals to the Leander Rowing Club boat, manned by four former Yale rowers all of whom lowed for Oxford this year.