BU DUAL

This week was the final week of regular season racing for all teams, with the #4 Stanford Lightweight Women traveling all the way to Boston to meet the #2 Boston University Terriers on the Charles River. The cMax rankings and predictions are an interesting way to look at some of these races (click on "Lwt" tab). By this measure, Stanford is actually #3 - 7.2 seconds behind Princeton and only 1.2 seconds behind BU. If you had a chance to see the race on ESPN+ you will see that the results are very exciting for the Stanford outlook at the IRAs. See the on demand replay here (ESPN+ subscription required).

Stanford flew out the 1V8 and 1V4 for the event. The 1V4 race took place first, and both boats started cleanly and quickly off the line. Boston University edged out a little bit in the first 500 and built a small amount of open water by the end, but definitely didn’t walk away with it. Margins of victory can be larger in the smaller boat events, and the 1V4 definitely hung in there tough particularly with a 7am race eastern time after flying in from California. It's also worth noting that three of the four 1V4 Stanford rowers are freshmen - BU's boat only had one.

Conditions then got slightly choppy for the 1V8, particularly compared to typical conditions at Redwood Shores. In addition to the conditions, an unfamiliar course and jet lag, Stanford had a boat lineup that included four freshmen. BU's 1V8 had only one. Both teams had a solid start, but Stanford just kept moving. They were ahead by several seats until the halfway mark, and then started to move again. They won by 5.3 seconds, which was a bit of open water over BU. If cMax is accurate, this would potentially put Stanford within a second of Princeton. At any rate, we’re excited to see a possible #2 ranking for Stanford, and now we know getting back to national championship form is closer than ever!

Read the goStanford recap here.