Harvard Denied First By A Blink

Blink, and you would have missed it.

Early Saturday morning on the Charles River, the Harvard men’s lightweight crew team finished .05 seconds—less time than the blink of an eye—behind Dartmouth to lose the Biglin Bowl for the second time in three years.

Despite the varsity eight’s close loss, the team performed strongly as a whole, winning three of the day’s five races. Additionally, the varsity eight, novice eight, and second novice eight all handily defeated MIT, as the Engineers finished at a distant third in each event.

In the first race of the day, the Crimson’s varsity eight stayed stroke for stroke—and was even up a length—on the Big Green throughout the course. The fight was tight from the very beginning, as Harvard found itself only down one seat after the start sequence.

“We had planned to take a big first 20 strokes,” junior coxswain Kevin He said. “The start was one of the best we had.”

500 meters into the race, the Crimson made a big push to move ahead and walked through Dartmouth. By the Mass. Ave. bridge—the halfway mark of the race—the Crimson found itself with a bow-to-stern lead on its Big Green opponents.

However, it seemed that Dartmouth wasn’t quite ready to give up. In the last 500 meters of the race, the Big Green brought its stroke rating up to 40—as compared to Harvard’s steady 36—and began pushing and moving back up on the Crimson. The two boats came across the line in a virtual dead heat, requiring a photo finish to decide the race’s outcome and to declare Dartmouth as the race’s victors with a time of 5:51.8 to Harvard’s 5:51.85. MIT finished in third place with a time of 6:06.4.

“It really came down to the luck of who was on the drive and who was on the recovery,” He said. “But from this race we learned we can fight [crews] back by staying in our race plan. We have to stop their move and once we stop their move we have to move away.”

The second varsity was also unable to power past the Big Green, as the crew finished about a boat-length behind its opponents. Like the varsity eight race, the second varsity crew also started down off the start.

“Right off the start, they put us down and a lot of guys will break right after that,” sophomore coxswain Dexter Louie said. “We managed to stay cool and were able to push them.”

Despite keeping its cool, the second varsity was unable to implement its moves and failed to successfully take back seats as Dartmouth slowly walked away from them as the race wore on.

“One thing we thought that the Dartmouth boat did a very good job of doing was that when we would call a move and push two or three seats, they would always countermove and would take those seats right back,” Louie said. “You have to hand it to them, they were a good opponent and they did well on those countermoves.”

The Crimson crossed the line with a time of 6:08.1, less than three seconds behind the Big Green, who finished the course in 6:05.6.

Harvard’s freshman eight posted the biggest victory of the day, finishing in 6:13.3, far ahead of Dartmouth’s time of 6:21.3 and MIT’s time of 6:23.4.

Next week, the team travels to Annapolis to take on Navy and Georgetown in the Haines Cup race.

“Navy is always a great opponent because they have a very good lightweight program,” Louie said. “It’ll definitely be an exciting race—we just have to stick to our race plan of ‘attack early and attack often.’”

—Staff writer Lucy D. Chen can be reached at lucychen@fas.harvard.edu.