It was as if lightweight crew coach Peter Raymond baked a cake but forgot to put the icing on.

Four of the five Harvard squads slid by Penn and Cornell to finish first in the 2000 meter race Saturday at Lake Cayuga in Ithaca. Yet, top honors eluded the Crimson varsity boat which had to settle for second place three seconds behind the Big Red squad.

"The team didn't race as fast as they could have," Raymond said yesterday. "They started off very nicely and took the lead, but thought they would win and let up. They didn't stop rowing hard, they just stopped racing hard and Cornell went right through them," he added.

Harvard jumped to an early six-seat lead as sophomore coxswain Greg Soghikian started the team at a 38-stroke cadence before settling the crew at 33 strokes. But Cornell pushed ahead at the 600 meter mark with a sustained drive.

The Crimson attempted to come back but in the last 500, stroke Courty Gates caught a crab which killed the effort and the squad crossed the already broken tape at 6:09.6. Penn finished last in 6:25.

Although the varsity boat bears the name "No Prisoners," the crew's slogan after the race was "no excuses."

"No one on the crew, thinks the race was indicative of the season," seventh seat Pasha Lakhdhir said yesterday. "All of us will work hard and come back next week."

The J.V.s partially avenged the varsity's loss by leaving the Cornell and Penn teams hopelessly far behind as they cruised to a 6:13.6 finish--almost two lengths ahead of the Big Red.

First quarter of the race before darting into open water for the last 1500 meters.

Take a Test

While Raymond said that the 3V's "did absolutely everything they could do to let the other teams win," they still managed to top Cornell by .7 seconds and take the Schoenbrod in at 6:23.6.

Both freshman teams triumphed as the first boat came together at the 1000 meter mark when coxswain T. Parker Gallagher called for a back-to-back power 20 and power 10. The second boat also took the lead at the halfway point, as they made their way through the S-shaped course in 6:30.3.