Harvard Regains Compton Trophy

Following a 2006 season in which Princeton seemed invincible, defeating the Harvard men’s heavyweight crew every time the two faced each other, the Crimson proved on Saturday that that was certainly no longer the case.

Last year at the Compton Cup, the Tigers won the trophy for the first time in five years—the first time in the series’ history that they had done so on the Charles River. This weekend, however, on a day of smooth waters and light winds on Lake Carnegie, N.J., Harvard won all four races of the morning in a clean sweep over the Princeton and MIT boats.

“It was great team performance, top to bottom,” captain Nick Baker said, “with still more room for improvement.”

The varsity boat had a suspenseful race, with an early lead by the Tigers in the first half of the race.

“We thought they were going to be really quick off the line,” said junior and varsity stroke George Kitovitz, describing how Princeton initially got a few seats up.

“Then they had a really big push at about 700 meters in,” Kitovitz added. “They moved in front about half a length, but we just kept the pressure on them, and at about 1200 we were level again.”

“We rowed level for a few hundred meters and then pulled ahead of them in the last 500 and held that towards the finish,” senior three-seat Toby Medaris said. “It was a well fought battle, with the results we wanted.”

Jess Hoy, who coxed the varsity eight, added that the race showed the boat’s ability to compete coolly under pressure.

“They were up about half a length when they made that push, and we countered them right away,” she said. “We have the ability to race from behind, and we showed that this weekend.”

Harvard eventually finished about six seats up on the Tigers, coming in at 5:54.3 to Princeton’s 5:55.8 and MIT’s 6:26.6.

This was also the first weekend of racing that two of the team’s seniors, Medaris and Phil Kaiser, were back in competition condition after time off because of injuries. The rowers’ returns led to some switches in the lineup from previous weeks, with Medaris in the three-seat and Kaiser in the four-seat of the varsity.

“I herniated two disks on my back, so it was my first week of training, and it was a really tough race for me, physically, to get back into it,” Medaris said. “But it was fantastic to be back in the boat with the guys.”

The depth of talent in the team as a whole was obvious in the second varsity’s storming 10-second, open-water win over Princeton in 5:59.9.

“We got up on them at the start, and then we started moving through them,” said Baker, who stroked the boat. “We maintained a constant amount of water on them in the middle 1000 and slightly increased the margin in the last 500.”

“The JV had a great win, so it means there’s a lot of competition for seats in the varsity now,” Medaris noted, looking forward to the next few weeks of intra-team competition to determine the line-ups for the Eastern Sprints in May.

“It just shows the depth of the team,” Baker added. “There’s not a whole lot of differentiation in talent between most of the guys on the squad.”

The first freshman boat also had a secure win after an initial lead that the crew maintained for the whole race, eventually finishing in 5:47.9 to Princeton’s 5:52.3 and MIT’s 6:34.8.

The third varsity eight and second freshman boat raced together against Princeton’s third varsity heavyweight and third varsity lightweight eights, with the Crimson third varsity taking a large margin of victory as well, in 5:55.5 to the Princeton lightweights’ 6:10.4. The second freshman boat finished over the Tigers’ heavyweights, too, coming in third place at 6:11.5.

The next race for the heavyweights, against Northeastern, is in two weeks, offering them a hiatus to concentrate on practice.

“With so much time, we’ll certainly be getting a lot of harder training that we otherwise would not be able to get in the regular one-week training cycle,” Baker said. “And we’ll be investigating the specific line-up of the boats to make sure they are as good as they can be.”

Hoy said that she believed that despite their unbeaten record so far in the season, the varsity eight has even more to give.

“I think we’ll just keep getting stronger and rowing well as a group and getting more confident about every part of the race,” she said.

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.