Malfunction Leads to Lightweights’ Loss

Four weeks of training, nine plane tickets, and nine crimson blazers—all for just three brief strokes that only gave a glimpse of what the rowers hoped to accomplish. The Harvard varsity lightweights’ lengthy stay at the Henley Royal Regatta was predetermined by flight reservations, but the Crimson’s tenure on the water proved ephemeral at best.

Harvard suffered an equipment breakage just three strokes into its opening-round race with Cambridge in the Ladies’ Challenge Plate event and lost by five boat lengths on Friday, July 1. In the furious first strokes of the start, five-seat Griffin Schroeder ‘05’s seat jammed, preventing him from reaching full slide and forcing him to stop briefly as the boat worked up to speed.

“Someone was telling me we were ahead after five strokes, so we had a blazing seven-stroke race,” six-seat Dave Stephens ’05joked afterwards.

Schroeder rowed without aid of his seat, opting to slide painfully on the bare track for 2,000 meters. The breakage forced Harvard to row with what felt like 160 pounds of dead weight. After the initial malfunction, however, all eight were able to continue rowing, albeit more laboriously than usual.

“He put in a valiant effort of trying to row with his seat jammed,” said Stephens. “I can’t even imagine how much it hurts to do that. But this hilarious part was that nobody in the crowd could tell. He was rowing half-slide and keeping in time.”

The Crimson quickly fell behind a Cambridge boat of heavyweight oarsmen. Harvard’s lightweight squad, competing in an open-weight division for the first time all season, gave up approximately 30 pounds per oarsmen to the Cambridge crew.

The Crimson was cursing its luck when the first round draw pitted Harvard versus Cambridge, which the 2004 Harvard heavyweights bounced from the Grand Challenge Cup event at Henley last year.

“It certainly wasn’t the easiest race in the world,” junior two-seat Wes Kauble said. “And we knew we would have to have the perfect race to beat them.”

Perfection, however, lasted only three strokes. Unlike USRowing, Henley has no breakage rule enforcing a restart when equipment malfunctions. USRowing permits a restart if a boat experiences major breakage within the first 150 meters of the race, said junior Harvard coxswain Mark Adomanis, who is also a Crimson editor.

But at the most prestigious rowing event in the world, replete with a large grandstand, enormous crowds, and a mandatory dress code, Harvard’s protest fell upon deaf ears. The Crimson lightweights were ousted from competition before they ever really got started. Cambridge cruised to an easy victory and went on to claim the Ladies’ Challenge Plate on Sunday over 2004 winner Leander Club (England).

“That was one of the hardest races of my life,” Stephens said. “As soon as it happened, I knew we’d lost. It hurt a lot more because I knew we couldn’t win at that point.”

In the rest of the regatta, lightweight boats from Yale and Cornell competed in the Temple Challenge Cup. The Big Red fell in the quarterfinals, while Yale lost the championship race to Trinity College.

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