Courtesy of Cornell Athletics

The Red hosts No. 10 Dartmouth this weekend.

April 25, 2017

Lightweight Rowing Handles MIT, Columbia in Geiger Cup; Heavyweight Comes up Short

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Lightweights

This past weekend, the second-ranked Cornell men’s lightweight crew team swept all four of their races at the Geiger Cup. This marks the Red’s 12th time winning the cup in the last 15 seasons, including three of the past four.

The first race of the day, the varsity four, proved to be a close contest between Cornell’s A and B boats, with the A boat winning by .4 seconds in a time of 7:06.9. MIT’s four came a distant third with a 7:40.2.

In the first and second varsity eight categories, Cornell edged out Columbia in close races (6:06.1 to 6:08.7 and 6:11.8 to 6:14.3, respectively) while MIT finished more than 25 seconds back. In the third eight, the Red defeated Columbia 6:19.2 to 6:21.5 in a two boat race.

“Who can’t be happy with those outcomes?” said head coach Chris Kerber. “We raced and executed well. But many things hindered a real peak performance from the crews this week — preparations on the inlet this past week were mediocre at best — we were beaten down by ‘too much weather’ that made parts of the inlet un-rowable or shortened many of our outings.”

This Saturday, the Red hosts the No. 10 Dartmouth lightweights at Cayuga Inlet for the Baggaley Bowl.

“Getting back to basics, having a normal week would be a bonus heading into the home race with Dartmouth,” Kerber said.

Heavyweights

The No. 14 Cornell men’s heavyweights endured a tough weekend, finishing last in three of the four races at the Carnegie Cup and getting swept by No. 5 Harvard in the afternoon. In the Carnegie Cup, No. 3 Yale won the first, second and third varsity eight races by comfortable margins, while No. 4 Princeton took first in the fourth varsity eight category, followed by Cornell and Yale.

After beating tough crews from Penn and Navy to win the Adams Cup in the morning, Harvard defeated Cornell by at least 10 seconds in the first, second and fourth varsity eight categories, finishing six seconds ahead of the Red in the third eight.

“By no means was I impressed with our performance,” said head coach Todd Kennett ’91. “I don’t know if we could’ve won all those races, but we could’ve been a heck of a lot better than we were.”

On Saturday, the heavyweights travel to Philadelphia to take on Penn and Dartmouth for the Madeira Cup.

“I want to see the guys take responsibility for their races and put forth an effort that’s truly worthy of what they are capable of doing,” Kennett said. “I want to see eight guys really moving together and pulling as hard as they can while they do it. When they do that, the boat will go fast, but this past weekend, I think we moved outside of that a little bit, and you could see it in the results—they were disastrous.”