HEAD OF THE CHARLES '06: A Perfect Circle

It is October—decidedly a month of neutrality in the collegiate rowing world, when distance is measured in miles and productivity is measured in months, not meters.

Any talk of potential springtime achievements is quickly silenced by the impending winter, one that promises to mute all IRA speculation until the warmer days of early March begin to thaw the Charles.

So it is that in October, the past often does the talking.

But the Harvard varsity lightweights, left without IRA gold medals for three consecutive years, have found little solace in recollection.

In Newell Boathouse, the current Crimson varsity lightweights with IRA gold medals are few. The last time the Harvard lightweight varsity eight won a national title, this year’s seniors were filling out college applications and racing on the junior level.

Four seniors, however, raced to gold as freshmen in 2004, beginning a run at Camden that has suffered two consecutive blows in their years with the varsity.

This fall, this winter, and this spring—all are part of their quest for the winners’ dock they claimed as freshmen three years ago, when everything was just beginning.

Now they want to end it the right way.

***



Perhaps at the start line, they were unimpressive.

Skinny. Short.

Maybe a little out of place.

There is no lightweight freshman eight event at the IRA Regatta. No lightweight freshman four event, either.

So in May, Harvard lightweight freshman coach Linda Muri picks four oarsmen and a coxswain from the first freshman eight to line up in the freshman four open weight race.

That spring the freshman lightweight eight had already raced to a two-second win at Eastern Sprints—the first time the Harvard freshman lightweights had won Sprints since 1985.

The talent was there, as was the speed, but the Crimson would be giving up as much as 60 pounds to its heavyweight opponents.

“Every day, we were getting better,” Brian Aldrich says. “We had a novice [three-seat Chip Schellhorn ’07] in there who had never raced in a smaller boat than an eight before. I had to switch to port, and I was really struggling at first with that. But we got a lot of practice in.”

The Crimson, lither and lighter thanmuch of the field, also looked a little bit slower early on.

“We didn’t have it together at the beginning [in heats],” two-seat Marc Luff says “But each race we got a little bit faster.”

And in Saturday’s grand final, the heavyweight-laden field could only follow the path laid them by a group of lightweights racing in a four for the first time all spring.

Harvard bolted to a quick lead off of the start, pacing the field through the first 500 meters.

“From 600 meters in,” says stroke and 2006-2007 captain Nick Downing, “we were in absolute control of that race. There’s a point in a race where I think to myself, ‘It would be an absolute travesty if we lost this race.’ And I felt that in the second 500.”

Aldrich, back in bow, remembers differently.

“Really?” he says with a laugh. “I wish I had known that then. I thought it was the third 500—we took a 20 into the third 500 and then we just smoked the crap out of them.”

The middle may have been a little murky, but the finish was emphatic. The Crimson rolled to an open water win over second-place George Washington, securing a national title in an open weight race for the first time.

“Most of the crowd couldn’t believe it,” says coxswain Mark Adomanis, who is also a Crimson editor. “The announcer in the boat said, “I believe those are lightweights!’”

Records are inconclusive, but the Harvard four may have been the only lightweight boat in history to earn a gold medal in the open weight freshman four event.

“Most of the shirts that were given to us [after we won] don’t fit us,” adds senior Brian Aldrich, who rowed in the bow of the national champion four. “Let’s just put it that way.”

***

For that lightweight four, wearing medals and sharing stories on the Camden winner’s dock, there could have been no better beginning.

A dominant showing at Sprints in 2004, when Harvard’s heavyweights and lightweights won five out of six of the top races. A national title in an event where lightweights usually have no chance.

“That was how we were welcomed to Harvard,” Downing says. “Sort of like, ‘Around here, we don’t lose.’”

“If you win freshman year, that’s what you’re expected to do throughout your time here,” Aldrich adds. “You set the bar high, and you don’t want to let yourself or your teammates down.”

The past two years, however, have been turbulent ones for Harvard. In 2005, Luff, Downing, and Adomanis were in the varsity eight, which was No. 1 all season until a shocking fourth-place finish at IRAs.

All four of them reunited in the 2006 varsity eight, when boats changed weekly and the Crimson hunted all year for any sort of rhythm. The team found it in June at IRAs, only to come within half an inch of a gold medal.

Twice in the varsity lightweight eight final, they’ve come up short of a reunion on the winner’s dock at Camden.

“[Winning] the freshman four is one thing, but the varsity lightweight eight is an entirely different thing,” Aldrich says. “The competition is different and the atmosphere is different. And I definitely want one after what we went through last year.”

The victory in the freshman four is ancient history by now, rendered obsolete both by shortcomings in the varsity and the perennial forgetfulness so integral to Newell Boathouse and its successes.

“Every year is a new year,” Luff says. “We’ll bring what we had in the past with us, but you have to pull hard and move the boat because everybody’s going to be gunning for that title.”

“You can’t go running your mouth about what you did two or three years ago,” Adomanis adds. “What are you doing now? People respect you more for how you conduct yourself on a day-to-day basis around Newell.”

The past—the freshman four title, the Sprints win in 2004—is good dinner time talk.

By now, however, dust has settled on those gold medals, new memories sit alongside old ones, and the pesky past tense finds only begrudging company in Newell Boathouse.

But in October, when races are long and cadences slow, the past begins to lose its slight hold in Newell.

“To be honest, what we did freshman year just doesn’t enter into my thought process,” Aldrich says. “You can look back on your accomplishments after you’re done rowing. But right now, we’re thinking about getting people together to row well. I’m thinking about how to get into shape for the spring—not about where I was three years ago.”

Three years ago, the four of them were together, clad in gold and crimson, crashing a party held by heavyweights.

They rang in an era with a win at Camden, and this year they have the chance to finish it off in the same place.

A storybook ending, after all, is the only appropriate complement to the storybook beginning.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.