Racliffe's varsity crews went down to tragic defeats at the women's nationals in Oakland, Calif., two weeks ago--defeats that have called into question some of the rules of the competition.
The losses were the first of the season for both the varsity eight and varsity four.
Victory went instead to Vesper Boat Club of Philadelphia in the eights competition and Boston University in the fours. Radcliffe's eight came in second with a time of 3.48.2, seven seconds behind the winner, while the four was eliminated in the preliminaries.
Despite losing the nationals, Radcliffe remains the top college team, if not the top boating club, in the nation, by its victory over the Western Sprints champion, the University of Washington.
The Radcliffe eight came in second in its heat, losing to College Boat Club, which rows out of the Penn boathouse. It was a poor start and the team members felt they could have rowed a better race if they weren't still suffering from jet lag, but their performance was sufficient to get them into the finals.
The four, however, was less fortunate.
As fate would have it, Radcliffe's four faced the winner of the Western Sprints and last year's Canadian national team from the University of Victoria in the first heat.
The heats were exciting ones--the teams never finished more than four-tenths of a second apart. But when Radcliffe placed third behind Washington and first-place Victoria, thus being disqualified from the finals, the question was raised whether Radcliffe could be displaced by a foreign competitor in the American nationals. The winner of the National Women's Rowing Association (NWRA) championship each year represents the United States in international competition. But displaced it was.
The loss to arch-rival B.U. was a hard one for the team to take--Radcliffe beat B.U. by 15 seconds in the Eastern Sprints.
The Radcliffe eight won the nationals last year and every one of its races this year. A team like that has few friends away from home. In fact, all of Radcliffe's best enemies got together--women rowers from Princeton, Connecticut College, UMass, Barnard and Drexel--with three women from Vesper Boat Club to beat Radcliffe, which they did.
It was a tense race for Radcliffe, which started at 47 strokes per minute, its highest cadence all year. The team finally settled to 40 strokes, but was never able to relax into its normal racing cadence of 36 strokes.
