It’s was a happy Mother’s Day for the moms of the Yale lightweight freshmen, as the top-ranked Bulldog 1F bested the field on Lake Quinsigamond today in a hard fought Grand Final. Yale rowed through Princeton to take first in a time of 5:47.95, just missing the course record set in the morning heats. The 2F had a great race, marred by a 12-second overhead crab just before the 1000 meter mark that took them from first to third, where they remained to the finish, despite a furious rally to overcome the mishap. The 2V earned a bronze medal in their Grand Final, finishing behind Navy and Cornell but repeating their HYP victory over Harvard and Princeton. The 3V finished third, in line with their ranking, although they made it close at the end by putting on a strong challenge for silver, falling short by only 0.5 seconds to Cornell.
The Yale varsity was unable to move up from their number 7 ranking and into the Grand Final, and had to be content with winning the Petite Final as the first step in preparation for the IRA National Championship on June 2.
In sum, the bright side for Yale is a freshman class that save for a bad crab might have taken both freshman events, and a group of upperclassmen who medalled in two out of three varsity events. Click here for full row2k results; click here for the official Yale report.