The Harvard heavyweight crew opened its Ivy League season with a disappointing loss to Brown Saturday on the Charles River.

Also on Saturday, the Radcliffe heavy-weights defeated Cornell but lost to Princeton.

The Men

Brown defeated Harvard by three boat-lengths, rowing its way in a strong tailwind to a Charles River-record time of 5:38.05. The Crimson crossed the finish line about ten seconds later, in 5:48.52.

"We rowed all right," said men's heavy-weight Coach Harry Parker. "The problem was, Brown was much faster. They're an exceptionally strong crew."

The defending national champions return seven starters and the coxswain, but have now lost to Washington and Brown on consecutive weekends. According to Parker, the reason for this is the vastly improved competition.

"This year's [Harvard] squad is comparable to last year's squad, but the competition has gotten a lot stronger," Parker said. "It's a different challenge. Brown and Washington are clearly much stronger."

However, some team members felt that Harvard could have done better despite the tougher competition.

"[Without even] looking at the results, the race was not a good one for us," said junior Didzis Voldins, who rows in the seventh seat. "We did not row up to our potential."

Voldins said that Harvard's not-so-great performance was partly due to the cruel hand of Mother Nature.

"We didn't have such a great week of practice because of some sickness in the boat," Voldins said.

Team members also said that Mother Nature held the team back in another way--by punishing Boston with a particularly severe winter. Harvard could not row on the Charles river until mid-March, a month later than usual.

"We lost a month of water time this year. We'll need a lot of time to get up to full speed," Voldins said.

"I'm not going to offer any excuses, but we will be back and we will be faster," junior Colin Chant said.

The Women

Also on the Charles, the Radcliffe heavy-weight crew team finished second in a three-way race with Princeton and Cornell.

The Black and White was especially pleased with its performance against Cornell, to whom it had lost in San Diego last weekend "by three or four seats," according to coxswain junior Laura Marx.

Harvard returned the favor by defeating Cornell by the same margin on their home waters.

"We feel that we have become much stronger in the past few weeks," Marx said. "We hope to get faster and faster as the season progresses."

The team is bound to improve as the team adjusts to the new lincup which was instituted only two days before the race, according to Marx.

"I feel that we will be really strong with time," Marx said. "This is one of the fittest teams I've ever had. Everyone is very strong and very athletic."

Other Crews

The Harvard JV avenged the varsity loss with a seven-second win (5:43 to 5:50), but the freshman heavyweights were also defeated by Brown, 5:48.5 to 5:58.3.

"I thought out JV team rowed extremely well," Parker said. "I was very pleased with the JV race."

Parker said that the freshmen did not display enough tenacity against Brown. "The freshmen did not row as aggressively as they could have," Parker said. "The Brown freshmen rowed very aggressively against them."

"There's a lot of work to be done for the freshman heavies," said freshman Terran Senftleben, who rows in the fifth seat. "Hopefully, this loss is what we need to pull ourselves together for the rest of the season. It's no one's fault but our own, so we need to work hard and drill, drill, drill all the time."