For most of the season when the Harvard men's track team has won, the women's squad has lost and vice versa.

At Saturday's Big Three meet in New Haven, the Crimson thinclads broke that pattern.

They both lost.

Thanks to a last-place finish in the final relay, the women took third with 41-2/3 points behind Princeton's 48 1/3 and Yale's 44.

For the men the end was much less disappointing, since they fell out of the running much earlier in the meet. While the Elis edged out the Tigers, 68-67. Harvard finished a distant third with a meager 35.

Despite the last-place finish, many of the women turned in their finest performances of the season.

Co-Captain Mariquita Patterson won the long jump with a leap of 17-ft., 11 1/4-in, took the hurdles with a time of 8.35--a few hundredths off the school record and ran on the second-place 800-yd, relay team.

Sprinters Theresa Moore and Dele Fayemi took the first two spots in the dash with times of 7.43 and 7.44 respectively. In the longer distances senior Kate Wiley took second in the 1500 and Co-Captain Amy Simon ran a gutsy 3000 and also finished second.

For the men the problem was injuries and bureacracy. Co-Captain Steve Ezeji-Okoye, who injured his thigh in last week's impressive win over Dartmouth and Brown, spent Saturday afternoon on the sidelines and as a result the Crimson was shut out of the 500.

Because of some line-up shuffling, not even all the healthy runners got a chance to see much action. Senior Cliff Sheehan was initially scheduled to run the 800, but when coach Frank Haggerty entered him in the 1000 instead, Sheehan was not allowed to compete in either.

The afternoon wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs for those Crimson runners who did compete. Senior MarkHenry, who has been Harvard's most dependable and succesful point scorer won the triple jump, but for the first time this season, he didn't place in the long jump.

Princeton's Jim Gendrin edged senior Jim Herberich in the hurdles by one one-hundreth of a second. Herberich also finished third in the 400.

The brightest spot of the afternoon came in the 3000, when the Harvard trio of John Duffy, Paul Gompers, and Andy Gerken swept the event.

The Crimson will be looking to avenge Saturday's drubbing when it-faces Yale, Princeton, the rest of the Ivy League. Army and Navy in the Heptagonal Championships this weekend at Dartmouth.