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He elaborated slightly in an interview with The Canadian Press last June. By then, Cruz had announced his presidential bid but Trudeau was still in opposition.

While the details are a bit hazy, Trudeau recalls an opponent who came prepared to dominate — and, apparently, Cruz did.

“If I recall correctly it was about an obscure monetary policy element that he had done an awful lot of research on,” Trudeau said in that pre-election interview.

“His poor opposition had no real capacity to rebut. It was a focus very much on winning the debate, rather than on any sort of fair chance to have a good and robust debate. But that’s the way university debating was played at that particular moment.”

If Trudeau lost to Cruz, he wasn’t alone.

Before embarking on a law career where he argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Cruz was the star of Princeton’s legendary debate team. He was not only the 1992 U.S. college debater of the year, but his team was also ranked No. 1.

A New York Times profile describes an aggressive debating style that occasionally grated on judges, but ultimately earned Cruz numerous victories still commemorated on a plaque at Princeton.

Alas, visual evidence of that Cruz-Trudeau encounter appears lost to history.

When asked, neither Trudeau, his McGill friend Gerald Butts nor the debate clubs at Yale, McGill, and Princeton have video of that clash between future political heavyweights.

In his autobiography, Cruz described how his obsession with debating temporarily hurt his grades. He exasperated his teammate-and-roommate, forcing him to spend hours analyzing minute details of each contest.