Wind didn’t dog ’em
Huskies power to Eights win
The University of Washington men’s rowing team is only making one trip east this season. It made the absolute most of that trip.
The Huskies fought through a gusty headwind, the twists and turns of the Charles River and boats in front of them to claim the ultimate prize at the Head of the Charles Regatta: the men’s championship eights.
Washington covered the 3-mile course along the Boston/Cambridge line in 14:40.823, nearly 12 seconds ahead of California. The time was the slowest winning time in 10 years, and 14 seconds slower than the Huskies’ fourth-place finish a year ago.
“We made some hard choices this summer, we left off our season last year not the way we wanted to,” Huskies coach Michael Callahan said. “It was really nice to gain some momentum today to prove that getting the team culture right makes a big difference.”
Arne Landboe, Guglielmo Carcano and Viktor Pivak, who took over at the No. 8 stroke position, were the holdovers from last year’s trip.
It is the fourth win in this event for the Huskies, joining 2008, ’10 and ’12.
Washington was so dominant that they passed a pair of “great eight” boats comprised of Olympians, including one led by two-time Olympic single scullers champion and six-time Olympian Mahe Drysdale of New Zealand’s West End club. The other featured rowers from Great Britain, including Tom Ransley, Matt Langridge and William Satch — all members of the famous Leander Club and gold medal eights in Rio.
Drysdale’s boat finished seventh. The boat from Leander was 13th.
“Those guys are my heroes, the guys we look up to, so to be able to juke it out for quite a long portion of the race is really fun,” said coxswain Stuart Sim, a senior from Australia. “I’m super honored to be able to race those guys in a hardfought race.”
While the wind was tough on all the competitors, the Huskies have seen plenty of it during the first part of the season on Lake Washington.
“The last two weeks have been 25 mph winds, so it paid off to get out in those conditions,” Sim said.
Defending champion Yale had the honor of being the first across the starting line to start this year’s race, but its hopes of defending were dashed when their shell went wide rounding the tight bend by the Cambridge Boat Club. While nearly every other boat went through the middle of the three arches that make up the Eliot Bridge, Yale was forced through the northernmost, and were only able to stay within the course buoys by coxswain Grant Louis dropping his left arm in the water.
The wide pass and need to slow down on course allowed Cal, which was the No. 2 bow, to go past. The Bulldogs were forced to settle for fourth. Harvard placed third, matching their bow number.
Callahan saw the Yale mishap and thought the Pac-12 rivals might take the title.
“There was a pretty big gap (after Cal passed Yale), then we came on and I thought, ‘That might be too much of a gap,’ so I had to hear the actual results to know anything,” he said. “I didn’t know until we actually had the unofficial result, so it was actually fun to tell the guys on the dock.”
The biggest jump from their bow number was by Wisconsin, which finished ninth, 14 spots better than their starting position.