IRA Saturday served up surprises left and right, but none bigger than the shocking exit of #1 Cal from the Grand Final picture: a crab in the last 20 strokes of race with some serious tailwind chop dropped Cal from second to sixth right in front of the crowd gathered at the jumbotron.

Just like that, Cal is out of the hunt for the national championship altogether despite a dominant season--both on the water and in the cMax polling row2k looked at in our feature earlier this week. Afterwards, the IRA Committee took a look at what happened and reviewed the video in case there had been an errant goose, but determined it was just a bad stroke and there was no protest lodged by Cal.

Also on our list of surprises:

• Radcliffe's Light Women's Eight winning the race for lanes against #1 Princeton;
• the two races shuffled out of sequence for breakage, both in Brown boats (1V and 3V);
• Syracuse having a day so good that they put all three eights into Grands (only Harvard and Washington matched that);
• a photo finish tie that meant both Harvard and Washington won the first semi of the 2V eight--and then a coin was flipped to decide that Harvard would get the better semi-winners lane in the final;
• and the 3V record getting broken twice, once in each semi, after have just been lowered by Cal in the heats the day before.

All in all, plenty of drama on the high seas at the Cooper River, which served up another afternoon of raging tailwinds and rough water that looked pretty much exactly what every other championships here dealt with the past three weekends.

The water was wild in this D3 Final

And it was a full afternoon, thanks to the schedule changes announced Friday night that we covered yesterday. As it turns out, the plan to drain the lake in anticipation of the rain event seems to have changed overnight. Instead of finding an empty lake in the morning, filling back up in time for the races, the water was high and word around the boatyard was that the county let the lake go up during the night, then let the extra water out in the morning. Some coaches seemed to think that meant the dam was open for at least the first few races, which can create a head current.

By the end of the day, we had a Grand Final lineup in the V8 that would have been hard to predict going in, with no Cal and both #8 Brown and #11 Syracuse breaking into the top six; the final set in the Light Women's events; two newly minted IRA Champions in the fours, the Georgetown lights and Washington; and the third different D3 champ in as many years as Trinity completed their quest to win it all at the end of the day.

Trinity celebrates the D3 title

You can read about Trinity's victory in the Caldwell Cup and Tufts winning the D3 points trophy in our full D3 Championship report, and we also have a full report on the Men's Fours.

Light Women - "Felt Like The Basin"

The Saturday racing started with the Lightweight taking to the course, with heats in the doubles, won by Boston and MIT, and races for lanes in both the four and eight, where the MIT four and the Radcliffe eight earned the top spots for Sunday's Finals.

Radcliffe 1V Lights

When row2k asked Radcliffe stroke Elle Krywosa for an early report on what the water was like out on the course in those first races of the day, she laughed and said, "It felt like The Basin out there."

Perhaps that explains the success of the Charles-based crews in this first round today, which included Krywosa's crew coming home ahead of heavy favorite Princeton. While it was just a race for lanes, and in conditions where maybe a crew might just want to finish safely rather than go full bore for little gain, it is the first time in a long while that any crew has been ahead of Princeton--a team that is here looking to win its fifth title in a row.

Heavy Men - The Full Pull

Hard to get past the crab in the Cal boat: in a tight race with Harvard edging out to take the lead, Cal was still in a comfortable spot to qualify, ahead of Syracuse, inside the last 250 when disaster struck. The rower could not get the oar unstuck, and first Syracuse snuck by and then Princeton--who had been knocking around in fourth--surged to life and sprinted into the last spot. Cal would eventually cross the line sixth.

Harvard's race on the front looked a lot like the full pull coach Charley Butt said might be needed when we spoke to him in our Friday report.

Harvard 1V

"It's very likely you're going to have to give your best in the semis," Butt said, and Harvard looked strong as taking the win.

As for Cal, some wags might point to their record this season and lament the fact that one of the fastest crews in the country will not line up in the final, but the progression is the progression and you do have to successfully execute every race to advance.

Princeton was the big beneficiary, of course, and suddenly finding themselves with a shot in what had been a tough semi both on paper and for 1750 meters. Afterwards, coach Greg Hughes took the wider view as he reflected on the chance his crew seized in the moment.

"What's really interesting about today and great for our sport is the level of parity," he said. "Even in races where you don't see noticeable misfortune, it's incredibly competitive, and that's so cool for Men's rowing.

"That misfortune was a sad one, and it's tough, but it's sport. It's not going to go to form, and you're going to have to be at your limit to have a shot and, that makes for challenging situations sometimes."

In the other heat, Washington took the tailwind by the horns and came home ahead of Dartmouth and Brown, who got the best of the Yale crew that beat them at Sprints. The race actually ran after the 2V semis due to the Brown's first bit of breakage on the day: the 1V hit a log and lost a skeg on the warm up, so needed an emergency repair before the crews could duke it out.

Washington 1V

With the win, Washington joins Harvard in the center lanes for Sunday, and both crews rowed 5:24 on the day despite the bouncy water. "It's definitely washy," UW four man Ben Shortt said about the conditions and how the Huskies raced them. "The main objective is to try to loop together as many clean strokes as we can. We know the boat's going to move around, and we know the race is going to be over quick with it being fast conditions.

"We executed what we wanted to," he added. "The feeling in the boat that we were searching for, we had for the most part. The boat naturally clicks, and every race we have, the boat gets a bit stronger."

For the Record, Again

How fast was it today? Well, the 3V record fell not once but twice, Harvard went 5:35 and then Washington lowered it to 5:32, to better the mark Cal set on Friday at 5:38. Just a year ago, Washington had set the mark at 5:38, so as UW assistant coach Nate Goodman pointed out, that event has gotten 7 seconds faster in just one year. Even as a relatively new event, the standard to win the 3V has gotten remarkably high in less than a decade on the IRA program.

UW 3V...fastest threeve ever, so far...

The shuffling of the races due to breakage--in this case a bad wheel in the Brown 3V that required another extraordinary boatman fix far from the boatyard--meant that Washington's semi (Semi #1) ran after Harvard's (semi #2), giving the Crimson's time a brief run as the record, despite what the time of day listed on the results timing might say,

Notes From The Course

New Lanes, Just Kidding - Semi #1 of the 3V was brought into the start and given new lanes, and even locked on as the officials considered a lane shift, but then were asked to pull away and lock back on in their original lanes...then the Brown crews wheel went flat, so the crews pulled away again. Needless to say, we have a lot of photos of that particular semi as the crews came in and out, did practice starts to kill time, etc.

Stadium Seating - we overheard one perhaps awestruck parent here at the IRA refer to the Cooper's portable bleachers as "the stadium" -- so that's going to be a keeper for us.

Ten Eyck Watch - As noted above, just three teams put all three eights into the Grands--Harvard, Washington, and Syracuse--so that would be our short list for who might claim the Ten Eyck Points Trophy this year. Syracuse has never won the Ten Eyck, but more to the point, anywhere in the top five, let alone top three, would be their best finish is as long as any one at row2k can remember.

Then and Now - a few coaches have mentioned the 13 year gap between the last Cooper IRA in 2012 and this 2025 edition...and a lot of the faces in the boatyard this weekend show up--looking just a bit younger--in our scene galleries from 2012. It's worth a look, we promise.