The four Harvard crews competing in the 145th Harvard-Yale regatta made the most of their extended stay at their New London digs this year, winning all four races (Varsity, JV, Freshman and Combi) for the full weekend sweep.
The Varsity race was the closest, a 5.9 second Harvard win. In this one, Yale and Harvard raced close for a little over a mile, with Yale even holding a slight lead at times, before Harvard pulled even, ahead, although never away completely as Yale stubbornly held on to Harvard's slipstream, never letting the margin get larger than just under one length of open water.
If the Harvard crew's youth and inexperience over the 4-mile distance was any kind of question going into the race (with five sophomores aboard, this is one of the youngest, if not THE youngest Harvard 1V of Harry Parker's tenure), it didn't show on race day; stroke Pat Lapage in the Harvard crew looked almost preternaturally relaxed over the first mile of the race before bearing down over the middle two miles to crack the race open.
By contrast, the JV and Frosh races were decided much earlier; in both, Harvard moved away from Yale early enroute to sizeable margins at the finish, 15 seconds in the freshman race and 16 in the JV event. To be sure, there was no lack of fight from any of these crews out there; the Yale crews showed great fight even from behind.
The single biggest difference on the day between the crews would have to be the cadences; all Harvard crews lengthened out to rates in the low to mid-30s (the Harvard JV touched 30 strokes per minute briefly mid-piece), while the Yale boats kept hitting it relentlessly at 36-37; a slight cross tailwind made higher rates supportable, but by and large, the Harvard crews seemed to row just a bit more efficiently over the distances. Long and low in a tailwind? It seemed to do the trick today.
Both squads now turn their sites on this week's IRA Regatta in Camden; it'll be interesting to see how training over the longer distances translates back to 2k for each of these teams.
It's unusual to have the Harvard-Yale regatta before the IRA, but it's also unusual that May has five weekends this year; both the Yale and Harvard squads came up to New London almost immediately after sprints, and as a result had the fuller experience of training for the longer-distance racing, including the traditional time trial, which had fallen by the wayside in recent years as a result of the quick turnaround between Sprints, IRAs, and this regatta.
The time trial is run on the full course; the V8 races the full 4 miles, is picked up a mile in by the JV, who races 3 miles, while the frosh and combi boats pick up the Varsity and JV 2 miles in. Harvard did their time trial on the Saturday preceeding the race, while Yale did theirs on the Tuesday of race week.
Despite its status as the oldest intercollegiate sporting event, the Harvard-Yale regatta definitely has to play by local rules; the Thames River is a commercial boating channel, so the racecourse gets set up only on the day of racing. With no fixed anchors, and only onshore marks and points to guide the placement of buoys and marks, the nation's oldest intercollegiate contest is, for all intents and purposes, a new, slightly different race each year.
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