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GOLD RIVER, Calif. – The Stanford women’s rowing varsity eight advanced to the Grand Final and the 2V8 missed out by a fraction of a second on Saturday at the NCAA Championships.
"The V8 had a good race today,” said head coach Yasmin Farooq. “It's great they will have an opportunity to show what they can do in the grand final and compete for a trophy.”
Coming out of lane four and racing in a stacked semifinal was the tall task facing the varsity eight. Racing against the top boats from No. 1 Brown, No. 3 Ohio State, No. 5 Washington, No. 10 Princeton and No. 12 Harvard was not going to be easy.
Ohio State got out to an early lead at the 500-meter mark with Stanford and Washington right on their heels. The three boats separated a little more by the halfway point, but stayed in the same order. Washington fought hard to overtake the Cardinal down the stretch but could not do it. Ohio State won with a time of 6:29.322, Stanford took second with a 6:33.274 and Washington was third.
“We didn’t have our best race yesterday, so we all knew we had a better performance in us,” said junior Kay Rusher. “Today we wanted to be really aggressive and we executed. We are excited to see how we can improve it for tomorrow.”
The varsity eight will compete for a national championships tomorrow in the final race of the day at 9 a.m.
The 2V8 semifinal ended up being quite a battle with three boats finishing within 0.257 seconds of each other. Yale, Washington State and Stanford all came into the final 10 strokes about as close as they could be to each other. The finish line horn sounded repeatedly three times without any space in between.
For one of the three teams, it meant they would not advance to the Grand Final as Brown had already finished four seconds earlier. Unfortunately for Stanford they were on the outside looking in when the results showed on the jumbotron.
Going back to last year, there was a similar race in the semifinals for Stanford’s varsity eight. Four boats crossed simultaneously and the Cardinal thought they were fourth, but actually they had won the race. This time around they were one stroke behind instead of ahead.
“The photo finish in the 2V8 semifinal was tough,” said Farooq. “For our sport, it's ‘May Madness’ and we embrace that races can come down to the final strokes. It's just a reminder of the strength and depth of the competition in NCAA rowing today."
The entire race was a neck-and-neck fight between Stanford, Washington State and Yale. All three were in second, third or fourth place at one time or another and they were never over two seconds apart from each other.
Stanford’s 2V8 will race in the petite final on Sunday at 8:24 a.m.
The varsity four was also in an A/B final on Saturday. The boat qualified through the reps on Friday, racing twice to start the weekend.
As is the case with every A/B semifinal, the competition was fierce. The Cardinal knew the challenge in store as they had raced four of the five other crews during the regular season and lost to each one of them.
Early on in the race Virginia, Brown, Washington and Washington State all separated themselves from Stanford and Texas. The Cardinal went back and forth with the Longhorns for most of the race and were able to beat them out in the end with a time of 7:37.184, about 1.5 seconds faster than Texas.
The varsity four will race in the petite final tomorrow at 8 a.m., starting off the day for the Cardinal.