Although the crew season, is a fait accompli--with the Varsity well established as the best in the country in the 2,000 meter sprints and its component parts, seattered to indulge in less strenuous, summer aquatic activities, Harvard rowing is not yet a dead issue.

The 2,000 meter distance is blandly called the "Olympic distance" and therein lies the motive for extraneous, post-season speculation. The fasts are obvious; there is a 2,000 meter crew race in the Olympics; a competitive nation by nature, the United States would like to win it; the United States will send its best sprint-crew.

Perhaps less obvious is the fact that the Olympic games will not be held until next summer. Between last June 28, when the Crimson champions assembled in the same boat for the last time as a unit, and the spring of 1948 when the U. S. representative is chosen, a lot of water--pardon the expression--will pass under the Larz Anderson Bridge. And the shell-load Coach Tom Bolles will finally call his "number one beat" for competition as the Varsity next spring will have unfamiliar figures in at least three slides--stroke, four, and two--as well as a new coxswain.

Stroke-our Frank Cunningham, who pulled the crew to its major sprint victories at Princeton and Seattle and earned an all-star rating by a Seattle sportswriter, will have graduated both from the College and his little seat facing the coxswain. Gone too will be Captain Bob Stone, who was at four, and Stu Clark, at two. Significantly, from the balanced-boat angle, all three are starboard oarsmen.

Filling Cunningham's spot will probably be the toughest. The rest of the boat conquers of falls on the pace that its stroke can set and maintain for them. Of course, as in any team sport, that isn't the whole story; but situations may arise, as they did in the four-mile regatta with Yale, that the stroke must carry the shell when his mates are having trouble. In that particular back-breaker, too little pre-race warmup caused physical complications about half-way through among the men behind Cunningham, who practically bore the weight of the speeding shell by himself until they had regained their form. He did not feel the strain until the last mile when he tried to raise a spring.

Bolles, however, is a wizard at developing a balanced, heroic, and--what is more--a winning crew from green hands. This year's eight, for example, had only two members with Varsity experience. If he intends to draw from this year's Jayvees, he will have the advantage of drawing from, tested oarsmen, for his number two boat captured the Eastern Intercollegiate sprint title for Junior Varsities while the Varsity was winning theirs. An unfortunate coincidence, however, is that Jayvee stroke, Oliver Filley, is already an alumnus.

A bid for the Olympics next summer, therefore, is too problematical to be anything more than the subject of wishful thinking. There is no question about who would wear the red, white, and so-forth if the committee which does such things made its choice now. As it stands now--as it has stood ever since 1936, the fate of the Crimson oarsmen lies under the battered, gray felt hat worn perennially by Coach Bolles.