M. Lights Take Sprints Crown in Photo Finish

They had waited eight years for all of this. For the winner’s dock, for an elusive Eastern Sprints title, for the thrill of crossing the line ahead of everybody else.

They had waited, had come in second and third and everything else but first.

And yesterday, after the finish line came and went and three crews lay paralyzed at the finish line, exhausted after 2,000 cutthroat meters of bow ball-to-bow ball rowing, they waited again.

The Harvard varsity lightweights waited for the verdict. Harvard, Yale, and Cornell were a blur of red and blue across the line, eight men right across from one another, battling for an inch of space in a race that left no room to spare. There was no arm-pumping and no celebratory shouts from any of the three boats—nobody knew who had won.

“Any race that comes down to the last ten strokes, you’re going to wonder who won,” varsity two-seat Wes Kauble said. “And it came down to the last ten strokes.”

But with officials crowded in front of television monitors, squinting to determine which bow ball had out-dueled the other two, the cameras and the bow balls had decided that eight years was long enough.

Harvard had waited for eight years, and the varsity lightweights took that bow ball and ran with it. The Crimson’s 0.2-second win secured the varsity’s first Eastern Sprints title since 1997, a drought that included three national champion crews which never won at Lake Quigsigamond.

“A race like this reverberates throughout the whole program,” Kauble said. “It’s not just our boat, it’s the 1999 boat and the 2001 boat and the 2003 boat and all the even boats, too.”

“A lot of the alums really appreciate it,” sophomore varsity five-seat Marc Luff added. “[An alumnus] came up to me and said, ‘You made a lot of people proud today.’”

The No. 1 Harvard varsity took the inside lane, with Cornell, Yale, and Navy lining up to the right of the Crimson. Yale jumped out of the start with a three-seat advantage over Harvard, Big Red, and the Midshipmen, although all six boats maintained contact with one another in the race’s first 1,000 meters. The Bulldogs widened their margin to a near boat length by 800 meters down. Harvard and Cornell exchanged seats in the attempt to catch Yale, creeping up on the Bulldogs as the boats reached the midway mark.

“Yale went out and they really had a gutsy go,” said senior varsity seven-seat Michael Kummer. “They rowed the piece how they had to row the piece. It was a well-fought race on everybody’s behalf.”

The Crimson, as it has done all season, erased a sizeable deficit off of the start by the 1,200-meter mark. Harvard inched back with a strong move against Cornell and came up even with the Big Red, using the push to gain precious ground on a confident Yale crew. Navy, which entered the race as the country’s No. 2 crew, sat within three or four seats of third-place Cornell.

Coming into the last 500 meters, each of the four boats sat less than 90 seconds away from a Sprints title. Harvard and Yale were dead even, Cornell was a deck behind, and Navy was a dangerous four seats off of the pace.

“Everybody was there,” Kummer said. “One second separating the top four crews is the definition of a close race.”

Little would change over the last 500 meters, once the crews became visible to the throng of screaming spectators. Even with 60 meters remaining—approximately seven strokes left—the Sprints title sat somewhere between the inches separating Harvard and Yale.

“Cornell started to fade with four hundred meters to go,” Kauble said, “and it was Yale and us for the championship.”

And in a race that had gone everybody’s way but Harvard’s for eight long years, the bow ball sided with the Crimson. Harvard crossed the line in 5:40.56 and Yale finished right alongside in 5:40.79. Only a slow-motion photo finish could determine the victor in the most recent Harvard-Yale showdown. Cornell rounded out the three with a time of 5:40.82, and Navy came in fourth at 5:41.53. All four boats broke the old course record of 5:41.2, set by Yale in 2001.

“Yale and Cornell had an incredible race,” said senior varsity six-seat Dave Stephens. “That’s anyone’s race—a coin flip.”

The coin finally favored Harvard, and it turned up gold for the Crimson.

“Right before the race the seniors got together,” Stephens said, “and we thought about how this was our last chance of winning this race. We really wanted to win this race.”

The varsity’s win followed the second varsity’s similarly thrilling victory in an earlier race. In that race, Harvard enjoyed its finest start of the season and had established a six-seat lead over the rest of the field by the 1,200-meter mark. Navy countered with a strong surge near the midway point, but Harvard countered that move with an impressive midway strike that put the Crimson up near a length heading into the final 500.

“We just find that groove in the middle one thousand,” said senior second varsity six-seat Nate Rogers. “And by fifteen-hundred meters down, we were a length up on the field.”

The undefeated second lightweight varsity continued its dual season dominance in the Sprints race, blistering the field with a sprint in the final 500 that left everyone else to race for second place. Cornell surged forward briefly in the last 500 and regained contact with the Harvard boat, but the Crimson did what it has done best all season long—find the finish line first.

Harvard powered through the finish line five to six seats in front of second-place Cornell. The Crimson crossed the line in 5:49.29, Cornell followed in 5:50.72, and Navy finished third in 5:51.99. Harvard held the lead from 300 meters in the race, widening the margin as the boats tore through the 2,000-meter course. After two come-from-behind wins in the last two dual races of the season, the second varsity enjoyed a more dominant Sprints race from start to finish.

“We got the job done,” said junior second varsity four-seat Chip Schellhorn. “We all came in here with a single objective.”

“I couldn’t feel better about it,” Rogers said. “It was a very poetic end to my rowing career.”

The Crimson crossed the line in 5:49.29, Cornell followed in 5:50.72, and Navy finished third in 5:51.99. The win marked the second consecutive undefeated dual season and Sprints crown for the second varsity.

With the two varsity victories, Harvard retained the Jope Cup points trophy for the second straight year. The two lightweight boats swept the top varsity races for the first time since 1991 and finished the EARC season with two No. 1 rankings.

“We have a job to do every weekend,” Kummer said. “We go out ready to race every day, and what makes Eastern Sprints so flavorful is that everybody is on the ball.”

Everybody was—but in the end, it was Harvard’s bow ball that was in the right place at the right time.

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