Strokes of (Near) Genius: Men's Crews Take Silver

This weekend was the feather in the cap of a very successful season for both the Harvard men’s heavyweight and lightweight crews—perhaps not as big a feather as either of them had wanted, but a feather nonetheless.

Both teams competed in the National Intercollegiate Rowing Championships this weekend, with each crew taking home silver medals after second-place finishes by their respective varsity eights.

“Obviously the guys would have liked to have won,” said heavyweight varsity captain Nick Baker. “But all the boats had incredibly fast competition to deal with and raced very well, and we were pleased with our performances overall, even if they weren’t exactly what we had hoped for.”

The heavyweight varsity boat fought a tough race, the lead swinging to and fro between them and Washington, the eventual winners, for the middle 1000 or so of the course.

“We had a really good start. We were riding level with the other crews,” six-seat Toby Medaris said. “Then Washington, Stanford, and ourselves started to pull away from the field. It was really tight—four boats crossed the line within a second or so of each other.”

In the last 500, Stanford made a push to challenge the leaders as well and ended up in a dead heat with the Crimson for second place, finishing the course in 5:34.125, just under a second after Washington’s 5:33.165.

Harvard entered two boats, the second and third varsities, in the second varsity division. The ‘A’ boat made the Grand Final after the previous days’ heats, coming in fourth behind Washington, Wisconsin, and Cornell with a time of 5:48.011, and the ‘B’ boat took first in the Petit Final with 5:50.204.

“We had a pretty good start. It was somewhat even, and everyone was going at it pretty hard,” said Baker, who was the six-seat for the ‘A’ boat. “Then we had a strong sprint at the end which brought us nearly level with Cornell, but not quite enough for third place.”

Breffny Morgan, who stroked the ‘B’ boat, said that they had aimed to get into the Grand Final, too, but were nevertheless pleased with their win in the Petit Final, especially since they beat two Yale boats that they will be seeing again at the Harvard-Yale regatta this weekend.

“An aggressive start placed us in the middle of the pack, and with a relaxed sense of power, we gradually reeled in Yale’s three-quarter-length advantage in the body of the race course,” he said. “In the final quarter of the race, we held a commanding lead over Yale and withheld a flutter from Pennsylvania by raising the rate of striking in a burning sprint.”

The freshman eight also got into its Grand Final, coming fourth in 5:46.681.

These results gave Washington the overall team victory with 216 points. Harvard finished 25 points behind, with 191 points, in second place.

The Crimson lightweights also proved their worth on the Cooper River on Saturday after a fifth-place Eastern Sprints result that had left many surprised.

The lightweight varsity boat, like its heavyweight counterpart, took the second podium spot after a close, aggressive race that again needed a photo finish to determine second and third place.

“Off the start, the field wasn’t level, but it was very close. There weren’t more than two seats between anyone for the first five or six hundred,” varsity coxswain Mark Adomanis said.

Then, as they came through the first 500, Cornell and the Crimson both started to make a push, drawing themselves up with Georgetown in the middle stretch of the race to fight it out between the three of them for the medal positions.

“We were making moves on everyone else but Cornell,” said Adomanis, a member of the Crimson editorial board. “They [and Georgetown] were really duking it out at that point.”

Eventually, after a fierce sprint in the last 500 and a photo finish, Harvard was deemed to have come second in 5:47.466 to Georgetown’s third-place 5:47.495 and Cornell’s winning 5:46.344.

“We had known Sprints were not what we were capable of, and we were happy to have shown that they were an aberration. But we had been very confident and very convinced, too, that we could show we were the best,” Adomanis said. “It was pretty emotional, as it was a very senior-heavy boat, and I really wish I could have done more to send the guys off with a win.”

The lightweight uncoxed four took sixth in its Grand Final after a near-collision disqualified the boat from the race.

The freshman four also placed sixth in its Grand Final in 6:43.019.

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