A magnificent effort by Princeton's freestyle relay team in Saturday's last event broke a tie score carefully engineered by Crimson coach Bill Brooks, and gave Princeton its first victory over a Harvard varsity swimming team since 1943, 51-44.

Earlier fireworks by the Crimson freshmen, who set two unofficial NCAA freshman records, may have assuaged slightly the pain of Brooks' first loss to Princeton. Australian record holder Neville Hayes destroyed Bob Bennett's old mark in the 200-yd. butterfly with a 2:00.5 effort. In the 200 freestyle, Jim Seubold's 1:49.7 easily bettered Roy Saari's old record of 151.0.

Going into the last three events in the varsity meet, following a Princeton sweep of the 200-yd. backstroke, the Crimson was down by 14 points. Brooks elected to hold Dave Abramson out of his usual 500 yd. freestyle event, and save him for the final relay. Henry little trouble in scoring a sweep for Harvard. Frey won with a 5.24.5.

Bruce Fowler and Porky Pitts followed with a one-two sweep in the 200-yd. breastroke, in 2:24.5 to tie the score of the meet at 44-44.

The freestyle relay remained, and Brooks sent his top freestylers to the block, including earlier winners Eillot Miller and Abramson. An aroused Tiger quartet, however, hitting its flip turns well, pulled away slowly but steadily to set a new Princeton record of 3:19.5 and to win the race by 10 yards and the meet by seven points.

The two evenly matched teams battled closely for every point in the earlier events as neither team managed a sweep until the last there events. After a Princeton victory in the medley relay in 3:45.9, Abramson won the 300 free easily in 1:54.4.

Harvard's Miller touched out the Tigers Dan Carmichael in the 50 free in 0:22.8, and Bill Frey came through nicely to win the 200 Individual in 2:05.8.

For the first time in the memory of most observers, the diving competition, resulted in a tie with Harvard's Dan Mahoney and the Tigers' Scott Andrews sharing first place with identical totals of 87.90. Princeton won the 200 butterfly, and then Princeton's Jed Grief matched Abramson stroke for stroke in the 100 yd. freestyle finally touching out the Crimson star for first.

Despite their two NCAA records, the Harvard freshmen also succumbed to Princeton, 50-45, in the earlier encounter