The Brown 1V shrugged off a strong start from Yale, an even stronger finish from Princeton, and pressure from Harvard and Penn to rally in the final meters and snatch a win by just .09 of a second; a truly epic race. Brown's previous win, in 2012, was also a nailbiter, but that margin was an almost-measurable .3 seconds -- over three times bigger than today's win.

"I thought they were in the pack with a shot at something," said Brown coach Paul Cooke after the race. "They were holding pretty well, early on, even though we weren't in the lead, with Yale so courageous going after it early, but it seemed like we were in the pack and not getting dropped, so I was curious to see what what would unfold."

"The crew told me that they were really internal, that they really didn't know where they were. I don't think they spent all their energy, but late in the race, our coxswain Jack DiGiovanni said 'you know guys, you could win this!'"

Brown came in as the #4 seed

Despite losing to Harvard, Princeton and Yale during the regular season, Cooke felt the team had enough faith in their progress to be in the mix. "I don't think we we had a ton of expectations. We talked about just trying to go all in and do it for each other and race as hard as they could race."

"I think we'd like to continue to consider ourselves one of those teams that has a lot of team spirit and unity and cohesion and works hard to make sure everybody knows they matter that everybody belongs and that we all share that victories and defeats as they go."

Before the final, Brown expressed some concern about racing in Lane 0 for the final (more on that below), but commissioner Gary Caldwell was able to convey that the regatta committee felt that the fastest three teams from the morning heats had been allocated into the favored lanes for the final.

The Princeton Tigers, who came into the Sprints undefeated and vying for their first title in the event since 2006, seemed to have this one sewn up with just a few strokes to go before the line.

With about 10 strokes to go, Princeton held the lead.

Princeton coach Greg Hughes was gracious and congratulated the Brown crew on the awards dock. "That was just a really incredible race to get to watch and to have a team be a part of," he said. "And I don't think that there was anything in there that I would see as an underperformance. They beat our best piece on the day."

Yale completed the podium, with Harvard fourth, Penn fifth, Syracuse sixth and Northeastern at the back of the seven boat final. (And why was the Grand Final seven boats? Read on!)

Princeton, enroute to their first Rowe Cup win since 2016, took the heavyweight 2V and 3V events, ahead of Harvard in both races.

"That performance was not a coaching performance, that was a leadership performance from the athletes," said Hughes after the racing. "I think if you look back to where we were two years ago, we were not at this level. And those guys that were seniors this year, there was a lot of progress that we had to make. And I think that for them, what they recognized, is that we did not have any standout individual players on our team, and if we were going to be successful, it was going to require the full performance from every single guy we had on our team. And that's what the Rowe Cup personifies."

The Princeton Heavies celebrate their Rowe Cup win

"The simple theme was consistency, what it required from us was steady, day to day, hard work and progress in a positive direction from everybody. We couldn't pick and choose our days, we couldn't have good stretches and bad stretches, we had to buckle down, and it was going to take a long time to do it. It was a goal 14 months prior, and to their credit, it wasn't just that they set that goal, it's the way that they led the team and motivated the team to step in, and up to achieving that goal. That was really impressive."

About those seven crews in the 1V Grand: in Heat 1 of the event, with Princeton out front and Northeastern and Penn battling for advancement and the critical second qualifying place, at about 1000m in, a flock of Canadian geese wandered into NU's lane. The crew struck the birds, recovered, but fell to Penn on the line by 3/10s of a second.

The crew then marshalled all the evidence it could muster, including Coxbox data that showed a sudden deceleration of the boat as well as photos from the bank to back them up.

In the internet age, finding this evidence wasn't hard. As one of the course referees quipped, "of course, the photo was up on Reddit before we even saw it!"

After some discussion, the crew was advanced to the final along with Penn, making it seven boats. It also seeded the top three crews from the morning, Brown, Harvard and Princeton into lanes 0, 1 and 2, instead of the usual 1, 2 and 3.

In the lower boats, Yale took the 4V ahead of Brown and Dartmouth -- this year, the event ran to three heats, a Grand, a Petite and a Third Level final -- are these teams getting bigger, or what?

Dartmouth won the 5V, and BU claimed the Heavyweight Four.

Lightweights

Just over 500 meters into the final of the Lightweight 1V, announcer Fred Schoch called the race "a dominant performance" by Harvard, and he was not kidding -- the crew had nearly a length on the field at that point. At the finish, it wasn't quite a length, with Penn closing fast, but Harvard had their first win in the event since 2012.

The Harvard 1V lights

"Starting last year, we wanted to restore the competitive standing of the program," said Harvard Lightweight coach Bill Boyce. "We felt like we did that. Ultimately, we want to be a program that wins championships. And so that's the clear next step. We're not getting too far ahead of ourselves, we still have the IRA, so the year is not over by any by any means."

For Boyce, the result came not so much from any change in the crew's training, but making that training better.

"I think everyone on our squad would agree that this result was two years in the making, because a lot of the crew is the same from last year," he said. "We specifically made sure at the start of the year to say, 'we're not just going to run it back and expect a different result, we're going to take everything we did and challenge ourselves to take it to the next level.' We wanted to optimize our process or our training, our growing our selecting our recovery, you know, every aspect of what we do, we tried to double down on what worked well, but then find a way to make it even make it allow it to make us even stronger."

"We pretty closely followed the training we did last year with a few tweaks here or there, but we repeated workouts almost to the day 365 days later. We would put up our scores from or our splits from the previous year, and just say, 'We're raising ourselves today. And we're, we're not coming second place to ourselves.'

"The varsity in particular, they they surpassed every single thing that they did in training last year. From the fall throughout the winter in Florida, every single time we repeated a workout, we would we would score it and it was always stronger than the exact same thing we've done the year before."

The Harvard 1V was called 'dominant'

With regards to Schoch's "dominant" call over the PA, Boyce said that he had specifically been looking for that call.

"Earlier in the year, I put together kind of an informal, cheesy slideshow for the guys called 'How to Win','" said Boyce. "We watched a lot of video of championship crews, and one that we took a lot from him was the 2022 heavyweight final at the IRA where Cal slips away from Yale, and Fred says something like, 'the dominance of the California crew is starting to show.'"

"Just on a whim, probably two weeks ago, I just hooked that video up to the boathouse speakers, and played that line while they were warming up, and I said 'make Fred say that about you.' That moment when he used that same word to describe what was happening in our race, that was a really special moment, it's just really cool to sort of see something come full circle like that."

With a win in the 2V, and silver medals in the 1V and 3V, the Penn Lights took the Jope Cup for Lightweight points for the first time since 1967, and only the second time ever that Penn has won it.

"The Jope Cup is a really special trophy in our league as it not only requires a deep, strong team, but also one that is ready to go on the day," said Penn coach Colin Farrell. "With such a competitive league, there is not a lot of room for error. We talked afterwards at the course as a team about this, but it really takes everyone putting in that effort over the course of their four years here - not only are there three boats scoring points, but others on the team are pushing those three."

The Penn Lightweights broke a 57-year Jope Cup drought

"We've had alumni from the 1967 Jope Cup winning team at practices talking to our squad about how special it is to win the Jope. Ultimately, it comes down to the team setting a high bar for themselves and working to run it down. I think this year's senior class has done an awesome job of channeling that productively to the rest of the team."

Farrell also reflected on how close his team was this spring. "Ultimately, the winning is the thing you are always chasing, but the striving together is where the magic happens. The team definitely roots for each other all year long - we live each others' successes and failures all along the way."

The Penn Lightweight 2V - the 'glue' of the Penn Lights

"Just to shout out the 2V, that group creates a lot of 'glue' for the rest of the team," added Farrell. "They bring an energy that is contagious. The Varsity seeing them win before they launched for the final was better than any pre-race speech a coach could ever give."

Cornell won the 3V and 4V Lightweight eights, while Georgetown took the Lightweight four.

Notes from the Course

• Two new course records were set this weekend; Harvard's Heavyweight 2V went 5:33.35 to better the old mark, while the Penn Lightweight 1V rowed 5:34.17 in their heat, about half a second faster than Harvard's time in the other heat.

  "The crew knew that it had happened," said Penn coach Colin Farrell. "Asher Gold, our cox, knew they were close based on the time he got on his box during the race, but I confirmed that on the dock." Farrell also indicated that the crew wasn't getting ahead of themselves. "They essentially said 'yeah that's nice, but we are focused on this afternoon.'"

• There was a strange finish in the Lightweight 4V, with the original order of finish being Navy, Cornell and Yale. However, the Yale 4V protested that Navy had interfered with them, and after conferring, race officials agreed with Yale and posted a final finish order of Cornell, Yale, and Navy.

• In cases of in-race interference, officials have essentially two choices: they can penalize the offending crew by excluding them completely, or moving them behind the aggrieved crew in the final result. In this case, the officials chose the second option.

• Are these guys looking for Northeastern?

• Only one coxswain toss today: the Brown 1V broke the Worcester lockdown and made it a good one.

DiGiovanni goes flying

Related Photo Galleries

EARC Sprints - Heats

EARC Sprints - Finals

EARC Sprints - Medals & Cox Toss