Men's Lightweights Capture National Title

Losing seems to be the best impetus for the Harvard men’s lightweight crew.

First the Crimson followed up its only dual loss against Navy on April 19 by beating top rivals Princeton and Yale the following weekend. So it should have come as no surprise when the Crimson followed up a fourth-place finish at Eastern Sprints by winning its sport’s highest honor at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) National Championship regatta last Saturday.

“If you look at our two losses this year, what we’ve done afterwards has been pretty incredible,” junior Alex Binkley said. “Obviously, we’d prefer not to lose, but if that’s what it takes, I’ll take it.”

Going into that race against the No. 7 Midshipmen, Harvard had held the top rank in the nation after easy victories in its first five races. The race began as usual, with Harvard starting strong and holding a six-seat lead through the first 1500 meters of the course. However, Navy bested the Crimson boat in the final sprint, upsetting the nation’s top seed by half a second.

“It was better this happen now than three weeks from now at the Eastern Sprints Championships,” Binkley said after the race. “We didn’t want to lose, but it’s a good lesson to work on.”

Harvard learned its lesson and devoted significant portions of practice to the sprint, after receiving a wake-up call.

“It definitely showed us that we were vulnerable because we hadn’t lost up until that point,” senior coxswain Jessie Tisch said. “We did have a bad race against them, but it made us realize that there are teams out there that can beat us. We were a little too comfortable.”

The Crimson put its renewed drive into effect the following weekend, easily defeating No. 2 Princeton and No. 5 Yale while capturing the prestigious Goldthwait Cup for the first time since 1997.

However, the Tigers would have their revenge two weeks later, when Princeton garnered the Eastern title while Harvard fell to fourth. The Crimson cited the uneven effect of a windstorm that created a headwind over only half the lanes.

“I felt very cheated after Sprints,” Tisch said. “We didn’t have a terrible race, but we knew that we should have gotten better than fourth place at Sprints. I think the guys and certainly I really wanted to go out and show everyone that Sprints was a fluke.”

With only IRAs remaining on the schedule, the task at hand was clear, and Harvard had three weeks to prepare for the national championship regatta. The Crimson rowers worked on following through at the finish of their strokes, thereby raising the boat’s cadence from 36 strokes-per-minute to 39.

The work and talent was evident on the Cooper River in Camden, N.J. last weekend, when Harvard won the national crown with open water.

“[Our reaction] wasn’t one of disbelief—everyone in the boat knew we could do it,” captain Nick Blannin said. “It was more a reaction of relief that we finally showed everyone the speed that we knew that we had. We’re just happy that we got a chance to set the record straight.”

Columbia, the Crimson’s nearest competitor, finished two seconds back, while the rest of the Grand Final field—Georgetown, Cornell, Princeton and Delaware—couldn’t come within three seconds of the Harvard varsity.

Although the Crimson had a boat’s length advantage through 1500 meters, the lessons of Navy had taught Harvard not to rest on its laurels.

“I saw that we were up 500 meters into the race and I just told the guys that we were up and that we just had to keep pushing it because Columbia is really strong in the last 500 [meters] of the race,” Tisch said.

So when the Lions tried to take back seats, the Crimson was poised to counter, and did, extending its margin of victory back to open water.

“I couldn’t ask for a better way to close out my crew season,” Tisch said. “It’s like a dream.”

When Harvard crossed the finish line, it was far from alone in its triumph. The Crimson heavyweights were also in attendance, and had won their own national title hours earlier. The presence of both Harvard squads in addition to the Radcliffe lightweights created an atmosphere of intense team spirit.

“When we came to about the [300-meter] mark, I could hear this ridiculous roar—it was so different from before,” junior Alex Binkley said. “We’ve always gone down and it’s been us with our one trailer with three boats in it—our boat, a freshman boat and a JV boat—and the girls. To have two trailers of boats and everybody down there...We showed up and everybody else was already there. It gave us something to look forward to, showing up and there actually being a team down there.”

Win the victory, the Crimson extend its run of winning national titles in every odd year since 1991. While this oddity worked for Harvard’s benefit this year, the daunting even-year curse is on the horizon.

“Now we just have to break it next year,” Binkley said.

—Staff writer Jessica T. Lee can be reached at lee45@fas.harvard.edu.

MEN’S LIGHTWEIGHT CREW

Results 4th at EARCs, 1st at IRAs

Coach Charley Butt

Captain Nick Blannin

Highlights The No. 1 Harvard lightweight varsity boasted a perfect 5-0 record in the spring season before falling to Navy. However, the Crimson rebounded to beat Yale and Princeton the following weekend. Harvard struggled in a headwind at Sprints, placing fourth while the Tigers took the Eastern title. But, the Crimson finished on top at last, as Harvard won the IRA national championship with open water.