Yale caps perfect season with record-setting performance
GALES FERRY — The list of accomplishments during Charlie Elwes four years at Yale includes multiple national championships and being in the winning boat in four Eastern Sprint races, but there is something else that the decorated senior rower will use as the criteria when reflecting on his career.
“All good things come to an end and what a way to go out,” Elwes said. “Never once did I give a shirt to a Harvard guy which is pretty special.”
As is custom in the sport of rowing, the losing crew members give their shirts to the winning rowers. Few things can be as humbling than rowing back to the home base shirtless after a loss to the rivals to end all rivals.
That is an experience that native of Newbury, England never had to deal with. Not only did Yale beat Harvard during each of the last three seasons, the Bulldogs’ first varsity crew were well on their way to victory in the 2016 regatta when the Harvard boat sunk. The race was ultimately ruled a no contest.
How rare is it for a Yale senior class to go four years without a loss to Harvard in the first varsity race? It last happened in 1984. Elwes will leave Yale as part of a senior class that has won 35 straight dual meet races.
“It is so special to do it with all your best mates,” Elwes said. “I wasn’t pulling for myself out there, I was pulling for the eight other guys in the crew and I think that is a testament to everyone in the boat, I think they would say the same thing.”
With Elwes the only senior in the first varsity boat for Yale as the crew featured five sophomores and freshman Daniel Williamson, more success could be in store for the Bulldogs who wrapped up an undefeated season with their third straight IRA national title and fifth straight Eastern Sprints Championship. The Bulldogs set an upstream record of 18:30.9 topping the mark of 18:35.0 set by Yale’s winning crew in 2015.
“It means so much,” Elwes said. “We are standing here on the shoulders of giants who came here before us. It has been many, many years in the making, long before I was here, long before any of the guys.
“We just have a lot of fun with it and that is what it is, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We can kind of see a trend happening with some other teams throughout the country. You can see other teams trying to imitate us and I think that is what we do really well and what keep us fresh, keeps it light, keeps it fun.”
Elwes’ younger brother Freddie Elwes was in the crew of the third varsity boat. Yale appeared to be in position to win comfortably before one of the rowers nearly fainted from exhaustion as Harvard rallied from a significant deficit to win the race. Many of Elwes’ family members were among the spectators in the Yale camp.
“It is special, it just brings out the whole spirit of the team,” said Hugh Elwes, Charlie’s father said. “We’ve got this whole balance of excelling academically, doing really well at rowing and also having a lot of fun.
“I love the whole U.S. system that gets them working from minute No. 1, GPA them and see what they are doing. He is just getting better, better and better, taught him so many things other than rowing, how to work hard, how to balance, it has been fantastic.”
Hugh Elwes was a rugby player and no member of his family got involved in rowing until Charlie headed off to Radley College in Oxfordshire, England.
“I was pretty bad in other sports in middle school and in high school I was pretty horrible at all things ball based, I didn’t have any hand-eye coordination,” Charlie Elwes said. “I figured I was big, tall, strong so I picked up an oar and it took me about a season to get good.”
With the tutelage of his Radley teammates including future Yale teammate Ollie Wynne-Griffith, Elwes realized that he had a future in the sport. It is possible that he could land a spot on Great Britain’s Olympic team.
“He is a phenomenal athlete, you will see him in Tokyo [site of the 2020 Olympics),” Yale men’s crew coach Steve Gladstone said. “His endurance, his steadiness, he is a rock and a pillar in the boat.”
Elwes will be returning to the U.S. to compete in the World Rowing Under 23 Championships in the Sarasota-Bradenton, Florida area. That is the next step in Elwes’ dream of making the Olympics.
“It has been a dream of mine since I was a child, it is not going to fall into my lap and I am going to have to work for it,” Elwes said. “A couple of hoops I have to jump through to get there and I will take each one as it comes, see how things go from there.”
There weren’t any hoops that he needed to jump through on Saturday as Yale was in command of the first varsity race even though Harvard was threatening the upstream record as well.
Sophomores Vlad Saigau, Jack Lopas, Matteo Sandrelli, Andrin Gulich and Orlando Nixon were joined Williamson, Elwes and juniors Leonard Jenkins and Thomas Digby teamed up to end the perfect season in impressive fashion.
“We do what we usually do in the first 800, we got ahead and whenever we saw them make a push we responded and threw everything we had at them in the last 500,” said Saigau, the coxswain.
Harvard won the second varsity race in addition to the win in the third varsity.