“Cornell started to fade with four hundred meters to go,” Kauble said, “and it was Yale and us for the championship.”
And in a race that had gone everybody’s way but Harvard’s for eight long years, the bow ball sided with the Crimson. Harvard crossed the line in 5:40.56 and Yale finished right alongside in 5:40.79. Only a slow-motion photo finish could determine the victor in the most recent Harvard-Yale showdown. Cornell rounded out the three with a time of 5:40.82, and Navy came in fourth at 5:41.53. All four boats broke the old course record of 5:41.2, set by Yale in 2001.
“Yale and Cornell had an incredible race,” said senior varsity six-seat Dave Stephens. “That’s anyone’s race—a coin flip.”
The coin finally favored Harvard, and it turned up gold for the Crimson.
“Right before the race the seniors got together,” Stephens said, “and we thought about how this was our last chance of winning this race. We really wanted to win this race.”
The varsity’s win followed the second varsity’s similarly thrilling victory in an earlier race. In that race, Harvard enjoyed its finest start of the season and had established a six-seat lead over the rest of the field by the 1,200-meter mark. Navy countered with a strong surge near the midway point, but Harvard countered that move with an impressive midway strike that put the Crimson up near a length heading into the final 500.
“We just find that groove in the middle one thousand,” said senior second varsity six-seat Nate Rogers. “And by fifteen-hundred meters down, we were a length up on the field.”
The undefeated second lightweight varsity continued its dual season dominance in the Sprints race, blistering the field with a sprint in the final 500 that left everyone else to race for second place. Cornell surged forward briefly in the last 500 and regained contact with the Harvard boat, but the Crimson did what it has done best all season long—find the finish line first.
Harvard powered through the finish line five to six seats in front of second-place Cornell. The Crimson crossed the line in 5:49.29, Cornell followed in 5:50.72, and Navy finished third in 5:51.99. Harvard held the lead from 300 meters in the race, widening the margin as the boats tore through the 2,000-meter course. After two come-from-behind wins in the last two dual races of the season, the second varsity enjoyed a more dominant Sprints race from start to finish.
“We got the job done,” said junior second varsity four-seat Chip Schellhorn. “We all came in here with a single objective.”
“I couldn’t feel better about it,” Rogers said. “It was a very poetic end to my rowing career.”
The Crimson crossed the line in 5:49.29, Cornell followed in 5:50.72, and Navy finished third in 5:51.99. The win marked the second consecutive undefeated dual season and Sprints crown for the second varsity.
With the two varsity victories, Harvard retained the Jope Cup points trophy for the second straight year. The two lightweight boats swept the top varsity races for the first time since 1991 and finished the EARC season with two No. 1 rankings.
“We have a job to do every weekend,” Kummer said. “We go out ready to race every day, and what makes Eastern Sprints so flavorful is that everybody is on the ball.”
Everybody was—but in the end, it was Harvard’s bow ball that was in the right place at the right time.
—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.