Sprint Champions

Sprint Champions For most of his 38 years Jim Rathschmidt has been a fixture around the Princeton boathouse. As a kid, Jim spent his summer vacations helping his Uncle Johnny Schultz, Princeton's sculling coach, rig the Tiger shells for fall practice. When Jim graduated from nearby Hun School he just naturally gravitated back to Princeton--not as a student, but as a coach of the lightweight crews, later as coach of the freshman heavyweights. Last week Jim was back at Princeton's Lake Carnegie in a different role: new coach of the Yale varsity, and the only big-time U.S. crew coach who never pulled an oar in a college shell.

After trial heats had eliminated eight other crews,* the Ivy League's Big Three met to decide the Eastern Sprint (2,000-meter) Championship. It was the first time in the 99-year history of U.S. intercollegiate crew racing that Yale, Harvard and Princeton had met in their own Big Three race.

As the three shells spurted off the mark at a 40-stroke-a-minute starting clip, it looked as if Harvard's perennial powerhouse would be an easy winner. Nearing the halfway mark Harvard led Yale by nearly a length, Princeton by two. Then the Yale coxswain called for a "big ten" (ten sprinting strokes). The spurt paid off. In the next 500 yards the Yale shell drew abreast of Harvard, skimmed past and kept right on going. Yale's winning margin: nearly a length, with Princeton (which had upset Harvard only two weeks before at a mile and three-quarters) another three lengths back. Yale's victory in the 2,000-meter sprint (the Olympic distance) looked so good to learning Jim Rathschmidt that he figured Yale, which loses only two men by graduation, "will have as good a chance as the western crews of going to the Olympics" in 1952. If Yale should make it, it will be the first time in 28 years that an eastern eight has made the Olympic trip.

* Navy, Cornell, Pennsylvania, M.I.T., Syracuse, Rutgers, Columbia and Boston University.

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