'THE MARINE SPECTACLE OF THE AGE'

Baseball and football were almost unknown and basketball was not even invented when the first Harvard-Yale boat race took place in 1852. But though these upstart sports later captured a wider acceptance, they have not even to this day been able to match the special quality of what has always been called The Boat Race. As the following pages of color photographs of last year's race show, the meeting of Harvard and Yale on the Thames River still serves to generate what one early newspaper ad described as "the marine spectacle of the age."

THE VARSITY RACE—four miles of torment for the rowers, 20 minutes of taut suspense for the watchers—was won last summer by a crack Harvard crew against a blazing backdrop of late afternoon

A seat in an inner tube provided a closeup view for Harvard law student Harry Fitzgibbons, who—with beer and cigars as fuel—claimed that he could move along "as fast as Yale's crew"

THREE PHOTOS

TONI FRISSELL