Despite the absence of its top three runners, the varsity cross country team easily turned back Columbia and Pennsylvania at Van Cortlandt Park in New York yesterday afternoon. Shortly before the varsity meet, the Yardlings managed to score a close win at the expense of the Penn freshmen.

Columbia's captain, Jose Iglesias, won the varsity race, but Crimson runners took the next four positions. Dave Norris was second, Jim Schlaeppi third, Wes Hildreth fourth, and Willie Thompson fifth. The final score was: Harvard, 21; Columbia, 38; and Pennsylvania, 75.

The race for individual honors was not close after the first mile. Iglesias, one of the best distance runners in the East, pulled steadily away from his pursuers and finished some 250 yards ahead of Norris.

Van Cortlandt is a long and hilly course and entails much running over rough ground. As a result of this, the field was more widely separated than usual.

Schlaeppi finished 100 yards behind Norris and Hildreth was still another 100 yards further back.

The team ran without Pete Reider, Dyke Benjamin, and Eddie Martin. Benjamin and Martin were ruled out of the meet for medical reasons on Thursday. But Reider got as far as South Station yesterday morning before Coach McCurdy sent him home.

Reider has been fighting a cold for the past few days, and McCurdy, hopeful that his second-flight runners could perform well enough to defeat the rather weak Columbia and Penn teams, decided at the last moment to rest his ace.

Crimson runners like Norris, Schlaeppi, and Hildreth handsomely repaid McCurdy for his confidence in them by running their best races to date.

Solid Performances

Other Crimson finishers who contributed solid performances were French Anderson, seventh, Will Julian, ninth, and Dave Donaldson, tenth. Julian's finish was his highest so far this year.

The withdrawal of the Columbia team from the freshman race due to an out-break of flu left the Yardlings in a tough, two-way contest with Pennsylvania. That they finally won out, 26-31, may be ascribed largely to superior depth.

Lee Tracy of the Quakers won the race in the excellent time of 15:35, finishing about twenty-five yards ahead of Jed Fitzgerald of the Crimson. Brandy Harrison, Yardling captain, took third, but Penn runners finished in both the fourth and fifth spots. However, Jacques LaFrance, Bruce Nystrom, and John Evans of the Crimson took sixth, seventh, and eighth respectively; and their performances were the key ones in deciding the outcome of the meet.