Lights Top Rivals...

The Harvard lightweight crew blew Princeton and Yale off Lake Carnegie yesterday with a clean sweep of all five varsity and freshman races.

The varsity contest, as expected, was a tight struggle from start to finish.

Princeton, with an initial cadence of 42 strokes per minute, jumped out to a one-seat lead at the start, but Harvard quickly made up the lost ground within the next ten strokes.

Crimson stroke Ned Reynolds then settled down to an unexpectedly high cadence of 36, a rate he maintained throughout the body of the race, two beats higher than the 34 the team had planned on.

The higher stroke rate was a blessing in disguise however, as Harvard began slowly to inch its way past the Tigers, gaining with every stroke.

The Crimson began to build a lead--one seat, two seats, three, four--and when coxswain Chris Ross called for a power ten at the 500-meter mark Harvard had a healthy eight-seat margin.

It was at the 1000-meter point that Princeton tried to make its move on Harvard. Tiger coxswain Gregg Hamilton called for a power-20 to cut the Harvard lead, but Crimson cox Ross responded by exhorting his charges with a power-20 of their own.

This was the turning point of the race, for the Tigers were able to cut into the Harvard advantage only slightly, leaving the Crimson with a comfortable length lead with half the race gone.

Princeton made one more sally at Harvard with 300 meters to go, upping the cadence to a 37 beat, and closed the gap to six seats. But it was a case of too little too late as the Crimson held off the Tiger charge to clinch the victory.

The final time for Harvard was 6:08.3, with Princeton at 6:09.8, and the hapless Elis far off the pace at 6:23.8.

In other races, the junior varsity met their stiffest test of the year, but prevailed over the Princeton J.V.'s by 3.8 seconds.

The unheralded third varsity boat of Keith Intrater, Dick Green, Charlie Haynes, R.T. Lyman, A.P. Quigley, Trum Cary, Bruce Ferguson, Ray McConaghy, and cox Glenn Bouchard capped off an undefeated 4-0 season with a narrow two-second win over the Princeton third boat.

The freshman first boat again displayed why it is the class of the East with a 13.2 second win over Princeton.

In the other race, the second freshman defeated its own third boat and the Tiger and Eli second boats.

After the race, a casual observer surveying the destroyed Princeton flotilla, remarked, "Princeton sure rowed like a bunch of tiger-lilies today."

He may not be too poetic, but at least it summed up the biggest day in Harvard lightweight crew in the last two years.