Men's Heavyweight Crew Takes Home Adams Cup, Others Falls to Ranked Opponents

With little time left in the regular season, the Harvard and Radcliffe heavyweight and lightweight teams looked to leave its mark in the water.

Men’s Heavyweights

With the team hungry to avenge its close loss to Princeton last week and position itself well against its rivals in the upcoming tournament play, the No. 5 men’s heavyweight team’s path back to success ran through stiff competition in No. 12 Navy and No. 13 Penn.

In the varsity 8 race, the Crimson’s quick and clean start allowed the boat to a four-seat lead over the nearest boat, Navy. Towards the middle of the race, Harvard made moves to further increase its lead to seven seats, but, as the crew found last weekend, there is always plenty of time for a last minute push from a team to overtake it. Penn did just that in the last 500m of the course, making a move to reduce its Ivy rival’s lead; but the Crimson boat responded by quickening its stroke to hold onto its lead and finish at 4:54.5, half a second ahead of Penn. The Midshipmen finished open water behind at 6:01.4

With this win, the team takes home Adams Cup for the 18th consecutive year, and the 53rd out of 80 years.

The 2V and 3V races also saw Harvard win again, this time by a wider margin. In the 4V and 5V races, BU, which joined for those races, edged out the Crimson.

With these wins, the Crimson amassed enough points to also win the Clothier trophy.

Men’s Lightweights

The No. 5 lightweights also faced off against Navy, but also competed with Delaware on the Severn River.

Unlike its heavyweight counterpart, though, the lightweight team could not overcome a strong No. 6 Navy team, which took home the Haines Cup for the first time since 2008.

Facing a strong tailwind throughout the course, the Crimson and Midshipmen V8 boats were in close competition right until the end of the race, where Navy managed to pull ahead and finish at 5:47.4. The Crimson stopped the clock less than a second later at 5:48.5. The Blue Hens came in third at 5:54.5.

The 2V race was a close call as well, this time with Harvard edging out Navy in its only win of the day. Navy took the 3V, 4V, and 5V races.

Women’s Heavyweights

The No. 18 Radcliffe heavyweights ended the regular season on the Housatonic River. In this race, the team looked to take down Ancient Eight rival No. 6 Yale, which had never lost a race at home.

“Yale is one of biggest rivalries so we were super excited to race them… and we’ve been using each race this season to figure out how to get faster...from weekend to weekend,” senior Mary Carmack said.

Despite rain, a tailwind, and a strong start by Yale, the Black and White kept up pace in the varsity eight race for the first 500 meters of the race. Over the middle 1,000 meters, though, Yale began to pull away with a quicker stroke. Radcliffe made a move, but it was not enough to hand Yale it’s first home loss, finishing 1.8 seconds behind the Bulldogs at 6:09.5.

Yale went on to sweep the rest of the races.

“Unfortunately we didn’t win today but across all of our boats we were excited about finding more speed, and hopefully we will be able to use today to get faster for the Ivy League championships,” Carmack said.

Women’s Lightweights

The No. 4 lightweight team hosted cross-town rivals No. 2 BU and No. 5 MIT in the Beanpot in the last home race of the season.

For the Black and White, the race was all about cutting down the margin by which BU had won in previous matchups.

“I think when we came into this race, we knew it would be really close, but we were hoping that we could maybe beat them because this is our last chance to see them before Sprints,” senior Kristen Faulkner said.

A strong start by the Terriers put it ahead by seven seats early in the V8 race. From there, it could not be caught. BU finished at 6:48.1, and the Black and White finished three seconds later at 6:51.3. BU dominated the other races on the day, except for the novice four race, which Radcliffe won.

Despite losing the Beanpot for the first time, the Radcliffe team did come away with some hardware: it won the Muri Cup.

“This week what we’ve been really focusing on was that power-per-stroke, and I think we did a really good job with that this race,” Faulkner said. “I think that it gives us the confidence that we can turn that into the championship next weekend.”

—Staff writer Katherine H. Scott can be reached at katherinescott@college.harvard.edu