Radcliffe Lights Top No. 1 Tigers

It was worth the wait for the No. 2 Radcliffe lightweight crew.

After failing to match No. 1 Princeton in two opportunities earlier in the year, and falling to the Tigers in their last 10 matchups, the Black and White grabbed a narrow victory yesterday morning on the Charles River and made a convincing bid for the top spot in the national rankings.

The race began with a ferocious Princeton assault and, though the Black and White managed a strong start, the crew found itself behind at the midway point of the race.

“They got up a length or so at 1,000 meters,” co-captain Ame Bothwell said. “That seems to be where we normally find ourselves, but this time was different, we knew we had to change that—we started our sprint early.”

Bothwell’s boatmates agreed that the early sprint was essential.

“I was thinking, I knew we had it in us, I knew we were really powerful,” senior coxswain Lauren Sheerr said. “If we just started early, it was wholly possible.”

The early push by Radcliffe proved to be the deciding factor, as it pulled ahead of the Tigers to secure the win, rowing to a final time of 6:58.4, excelling Princeton’s mark of 6:59.6.

The Black and White red-letter day avenged a string of 10 losses to the Tigers, dating back to May 4, 2002—a series that has included two Eastern Sprint championships and two IRA National Championships.

Despite Radcliffe being hard-pressed recently to find victory against the Tigers, the crew felt it was constantly closing the gap.

“We race so often that each race has a lot of pressure, this race more so because we’ve been so close to them,” Bothwell said. “We’ve been getting closer and closer to them, so we weren’t even really surprised by the win.”

The Black and White went into this season ranked No. 1 nationally, but a loss to this same Tiger squad in their first race—at the Windemere Cup in Redwood Shores, Calif.—dropped Radcliffe from that throne. Now, having defeated its rival, the Black and White looks to regain the top spot.

“Rankings can be subjective,” Bothwell warns—but the team sounds confident that it will leapfrog Princeton in the next poll after the head-to-head win. The narrow margin of victory, however, might not be enough to surpass an otherwise flawless season for the Tigers so far. But irrespective of its ranking in the next poll, Radcliffe has a title in their sights after getting past Princeton at last.

“I think we have to be realistic,” Sheerr said. “It was a tight race. We can’t take anything for granted—we can’t wait to surprise them with a sprint every time. But we definitely have it in us to win a national championship.”

In other races, the Princeton varsity four (7:49.6) mauled Radcliffe (8:06.1) by a margin of over 15 seconds. Princeton’s novice eight also scored a sizeable victory, 7:26.3 to 7:41.2.

Yet the mood of the Black and White was definitively upbeat in spite of those setbacks.

According to Sheerr, the win over their archrival prompted smiles all around.

“One of the best parts of the race was coming into the last ten strokes of the race, looking over at the Princeton boat and seeing that we were about five seats up and then looking up at my stroke and just seeing this huge grin on her face,” Sheerr said. “It was like everything we had been working for had come together.”