Lightweights Renew Princeton Rivalry

One spring season has gone and another remains off in the distance. The leaves have changed color, and crew teams take to the water for longer head-race pieces instead of 2Ks. But there are some things that seasons can’t change, and the rivalry between the Harvard and Princeton lightweight rowing teams seems to be one of them.

After a Head of the Charles in which the Tigers stole the show, the Crimson proved that the rivalry is still a battle of equals yesterday on Lake Carnegie, Princeton’s home course.

The teams traded places, with the Tigers winning the Lightweight 8+ and Harvard taking top honors in the Lightweight 4+.

“We’re happy. It looks like we’ve improved from last week,” Crimson coach Charley Butt said. “We know that we have quality through the entire lineup.”

On Carnegie’s head-racing course this past weekend, crews raced in a tailwind for a little over half the race, took a sharp turn, and finished the race in a headwind. Harvard’s top four, which had been in second place in the first part of the race, took advantage of the shift.

The Crimson’s top four, which usually rates slightly lower than Princeton, according to captain Will Newell, was able to use a long, powerful rhythm in the headwind to take it to the top of the fours competition. That four, consisting of Newell, juniors Tom Nesel and coxswain Angela Chang, and sophomores Matt O’Leary and Erich Schultze, topped second-place Georgetown by nearly eight seconds, with the Tigers finishing over 12 seconds behind Harvard for a third-place finish.

The Crimson’s other three fours placed fourth, fifth, and ninth, making Harvard the deepest team in that event. In fact, its fourth boat beat the top entries of five teams: Yale, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, Navy, and MIT.

“It was very gratifying to see everyone perform well,” Butt said. “That just means we’re working on the right things, we’re making improvements. The adjustments we’re making are, for all we know, correct.”

But while the Crimson took the cake in the fours races, the home team had its way in the eights.

Princeton’s A boat edged out Harvard’s by a little over three seconds to win the race.

The Crimson was five seconds ahead of the Tigers after the first half of the race, but Princeton was able reel in Harvard in the back half.

“It was a very good race,” junior Austin Meyer said. “Last weekend at the Charles, we were 15 seconds behind Princeton. So we came in with a fresh perspective, a more relaxed team atmosphere. Overall, the race was really really good and promising.”

The Tigers B boat took fourth overall, while the seventh-place finish by Harvard’s B boat was good for second among B entries. The Crimson’s C boat finished 22nd overall.

While the races finished without controversy, Halloween was not without its tricks, and Harvard’s freshmen were one of its targets. During its warm-up, the Crimson’s top freshman boat lost its skeg, leaving the rookies to race without the steering device on their boat’s stern.

“It didn’t really contribute to boat speed,” freshman coach Linda Muri said. “They had stopped to get some water, they blew a little closer to shore [and] ran into a partially submerged stump, [which] broke the skeg off.”

But despite the setback, the freshmen still managed to place ninth in the Freshman 8+ race, an event that included heavyweights.

“Persevering in that kind of adversity: that’s a challenge you don’t expect,” Muri said. “That’s just the nature of a head race. We saw a number of boats that had lost skegs. It’s pretty easy to tell a crew [without a skeg] by its steering.”

“We feel like they did well,” Butt added. “To their credit, they didn’t panic, they just rowed hard without a skeg.”

Harvard’s second boat, which consisted entirely of walk-ons, finished 30th in what was the first race for all of its members. The rookies turned it a time of 16:08.5. The time put the Crimson near the bottom of pack, but the boat still managed to beat Princeton’s second heavyweight 8+.

“I talked to them about how fast a race goes by,” Muri said. “It’s hard to know what to expect the first time. They felt like they rowed well, they had some balance at times. I can’t expect them to have a perfect race.”

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.