All sports feature a winner and a loser - it is just how they are by definition. If everybody wins, you are in a movie, and if everybody loses then it is communism. For us athletes that dwell between the white lights and the Red Scare, there exists the possibility of winning or losing in every competition. I only mention this because the crew team, for the first time this season, experienced losing.
     And I'm supposed to write about the crew team. This is a difficult article to write because I, like many of my teammates, enjoy losing about as much as I enjoy getting kicked in the eye at that Rage Against the Machine concert three years ago, where five minutes later I lost a shoe and had to walk to the car barefoot because I didn't want my hips to get misaligned and then I got a very small pebble embedded in my right foot that for all I know is still there. It hurts every other Thursday. I was again in the Men's Varsity 8, which saw both Ithaca College and Colgate University defeat us. The method we chose to employ in losing made it especially frustrating. After a promising start, we were entrenched in a back-and-forth battle with Ithaca and were well up on Colgate. Unfortunately, the battle was over much sooner than we would have preferred. Ithaca did not fire a decisive shot, but rather our own cannon malfunctioned and exploded in our faces, burning off several of our eyebrows in the process.
     Note - our boat does not actually have a cannon. But it does have a rudder, which chose that particular moment to malfunction. Our course was suddenly directly into a tree floating near the shore. We were instantly entangled in a bivouac of the worst kind and wasted precious seconds bushwhacking our way back onto the course. We were somewhat discouraged but pressed on. In fact, we battled back to again make a race of it, only to engage our second inanimate opponent of the day - a pile of rocks also inhabiting the shore area. The outcome was similar - the rocks won.
     End result, we lost - our two opponents were doing a race instead of an obstacle course. As was thoroughly proven above, losing is a part of sports. Unfortunately, we were not the only boat on the team that lost. The Women's Varsity 4 deserves congratulations for being the exception to the rule in what was a good weekend for "moral" victories.
     The results, using the same format as last week - Men's 8 placed 3rd, 13.0 seconds behind, Men's Novice 8 placed 2nd, 29.4 seconds behind, Women's 8 placed 3rd, 40.8 seconds, Women's Novice 8 placed 3rd, 38.7 seconds behind, Women's Light 8 placed 2nd, 21.5 seconds behind and Women's varsity 4 placed 1st 5.5 seconds ahead.

Brune can be reached at pbrune@campustimes.org