UW men, women cruise to Windermere Cup wins

In the beginning (of collegiate rowing, that is), there was Oxford.

At the finish of Saturday's Windermere Cup men's varsity-eight race, there was Washington, all alone and looking every bit like a defending national champion with all the tools needed to repeat.

"They're extremely good," said Oxford assistant coach Andy Nelder, whose university competed in history's first collegiate athletic event, a rowing race against Cambridge, in 1829.

In front of an opening-day crowd along Montlake Cut that UW director of rowing Bob Ernst estimated at 40,000, Washington's top-ranked varsity men and ninth-ranked women both cruised to lopsided wins, each claiming their fourth straight Windermere Cup victories.

Crews from Syracuse finished second in both races, the 10th-ranked men finishing nearly 10 seconds behind UW's winning time of 5:39.9 on the 2,000-meter course with Oxford finishing 12 seconds back. Meanwhile the UW women (6:27.9) smoked unranked Syracuse by 16 seconds and Oxford by 27.

UW men's coach Michael Callahan was pleased with his crew's outing one week after trouncing second-ranked California by setting a new course record on the Golden Bears' home water at Redwood Shores.

"We were kind of on an emotional high," Callahan said of the win at Cal, "so we wanted to focus on getting into our base rhythm off the start while being pressed by a competitor that would give us a good challenge."

Doing so, Callahan says, results in more speed late in the race. "I saw some power shifts in the last 500 meters that were really effective in bringing more speed all the way to the end," he said.

Vital to that effort was the rower in the sixth seat, junior Hannes Heppner from Berlin.

"It was key that the sixth man really stay on Mathis (Jessen, the UW stroke) and support him on those first few strokes when making a shift from your high strokes to your longer, more powerful base strokes,"Callahan said. "He did that. He was just crushing the oar. When he gets his oar timed right with Mathis, who's setting the pace, the boat really goes."

When UW transitioned into sprint mode late in the race, Jessen liked the surge in the boat. "When we come out of the base rate, it's always an important part of the race," said Jessen, a sophomore from Hamburg, Germany. "When we did, I knew it had gone well. The boat was sticking together, and I had a confident feeling there."

Notes

• UW's junior varsity eights also easily won the Erickson Cascade Cups. The men (5:42.4) finished eight seconds ahead of Syracuse and 27 ahead of Oregon State. The women (6:35.2) topped Western Washington by 11 seconds and Syracuse by 26.

• Oxford borrowed a UW boat while in Seattle but brought its distinctive dark blue oars. Nelder said it was "a little complicated" in Seattle locating the oars after the airline removed them from the plane. "But it wasn't as bad as when Cambridge went to Brazil a number of years ago (mid-1990s) when they cut the blades in half to see if they were full of drugs," Nelder said. "They said, 'Here are your blades.' Cambridge said, 'Well, you might as well keep them.' "