Just call it a bad omen.

En route to the 62nd running of the Compton Cup at Princeton, Harvard heavyweight crew had a bit of a problem with the boat trailer--it fell off. Although the varsity and JV shells were uninjured, minimal (but repairable) damage was done to the two freshman shells.

That in itself was not a problem; the freshman borrowed a boat from the Tigers. The problem is that the trailer incident foreshadowed the Harvard heavyweight crew weekend.

The Crimson--coming off an unexpected victory the previous weekend over a top-ranked Brown crew--fell back to earth this weekend on Lake Carnegie in Princeton, N.J.

Princeton--capturing the Cup for only the second time in 34 years--clocked in at 5:37.50, more than two seconds better than Harvard's 5:39.36 MIT placed a distant third, in 5:58.43.

Harvard started the 2000-meter race at a strong clip, building a two seat lead on Princeton (and significantly more on MIT) by the 1000-meter mark.

"We were down four seats off the start, and very gradually came back and established a the two-seat lead," captain Elijah White said. "It was very continuous, and very steady."

"I think our start was very encouraging," senior Ben Hochberg said. "We are not a crew that starts off very fast. We did some work on that, and it seems to have paid off."

The story of the race, however, was not the start but the third 500 meters. In that distance, Princeton went from two seats down to four seats up. Harvard's big boat could not respond to Princeton's power stroking.

"Princeton started to make a move, and we didn't respond as well as we could have," Hochberg said. "There were one or two moves that we couldn't answer or couldn't answer strongly enough."

"Princeton was two lanes over, and we couldn't tell they were down with their move until they had a four-seat lead," White said.

MIT, which has captured the cup only once, barely appeared on the other two crews's radar screens. The Engineers were eating the Crimson and Tiger's wake by the time the first 500 meters were over.

"No one was paying attention to MIT," Hochberg said. "I don't think MIT was much of a factor."

Regardless of final outcome, White Hochberg and company remain upbeat about the crew's prospects at Eastern Championships.

"The end result wasn't what we wanted, but we did race a strong, hard race." Hochberg said.