The preparations of the two crews could not have been more different, as Yale opted to skip the IRA to spend the better part of four weeks preparing for Harvard, while Harvard returned from the west coast and what by any accounting has been a fairly heavy travel schedule over the whole spring just 5 days before the racing with Yale.

Beyond the divergent approaches taken by the crews in preparing for the racing, the biggest storyline had to be the conditions; with the racing running downstream, towards the sea, and a big wind running directly into the current, the water for the three races run on Saturday was somewhere between "bad" and "biblical" for large parts of the racing.

Freshman Eight

Yale started off hard in this one, holding a slight edge early in the two-mile contest. Harvard was unfazed, held their ground, and began to claw their way back into the race after settling down in the first half mile or so, before starting to move confidently through. Yale kept the pressure on, but as the water worsened in the middle mile, Harvard rowed just that much better and began to open water on Yale. A small crab (amazingly, the only crab in the combined nine miles of racing on the day) late in the race in the Yale boat certainly did not help their cause, as Harvard went on to win this race by just over 7 seconds.

Junior Varsity Eight

This race, the three-miler, was the real barn-burner of the day with both crews near victory at one point or another. The crews started near level, before Harvard started to edge ahead, opening as much as a half-length or so of open water near the midpoint of the race. Yale, not showing an ounce of quit, started to crank it back up going into the last mile of the race and slowed ate away at the Harvard lead, closing to bow-to-stern, then pushing their deck further and further up through the Harvard crew as the Crimson held firm; at the line, the verdict was 5 seats for Harvard and both crews were clearly spent.

Varsity Eight

Any comfort in a four-mile race in awful conditions can only come from the certainty that one has the race in hand, and the Harvard V8 did just that, moving out to a commanding lead early enough so that they could maintain equipoise through the worst of the water, midway through the piece; the Crimson, off the line at 37 strokes per minute, had shifted down to a long 32 by midway, holding off a Yale crew rowing at times two or three beats higher than them. Both crews moved at about the same speed for the last two or two and a half miles or so, but the damage had been done, as Harvard kept Yale at a consistent near-20 second distance for the balance of the race; that margin would stand across the line, as the Crimson varsity completed the sweep by 19.5 seconds.

The Harvard-Yale regatta also features a Friday race, the "combi boat" of 3V/2F athletes, also won by Harvard, whose members then duly busied themselves into the night by painting The Rock in Harvard colors.

Beyond being a boatrace, the Harvard-Yale regatta truly has a life of its own on the margins, partly because of its age, partly because of the institutions involved, and partly due to its own evolution over the years.