Soldiers Field, Cambridge, MA, USA, July 11, 1925
In July, a spirited group of young athletes from Oxford and Cambridge Universities travelled across the Atlantic to compete in the Greater Boston area against a combined squad from Harvard and Yale.
The 800m Olympic champion Douglas Lowe from the British team emerged as a key figure of the seventh transatlantic university match. He sped to a sovereign victory first in the two-lap race (880 yards) and, at the end of the afternoon, also in the four-lap competition (mile). In the 880 yards, the world-leading time of 1:53.4 was set (corresponding to a time of 1:52.8 for the metric distance). In what was perhaps the toughest two-lap race of the 1925 season, John Watters toiled to second place with the season's fourth-fastest time of 1:53.8. The result perhaps consoled the Harvard University fellow who had slumped to seventh in the Paris Olympic final.
Future Olympic champion Sabin Carr from Yale cleared a meet record of 3.96 (13-0). The Yale chap finally also made attempts at 4.11 (13-6), a height described by the contemporary press as "dizzying."
The Americans took a one-two finish in the 100 yards. The bull-like Al Miller, weighing over 90kg (200 pounds), bulldozed to victory, beating Bayes Norton, the Olympic fifth-place finisher in the 200 meters, who later in life worked on the Manhattan Project.
Future Olympic champion Lord Burghley narrowly won the 120-yard hurdles but finished third in the 220-yard hurdles.
The transatlantic meet ended in 1925 in a tie, 6-6 in event wins. However, the Yale and Harvard crew took more second places. The American press interpreted the scoring method with cheerful home bias and declared Yale-Harvard the winner. Of the six previous transatlantic matches, Yale-Harvard had won three and Oxford-Cambridge three, so the university meets continued to be close and exciting.