About two weeks ago I had the honor of acting as announcer for the annual Bowling Green – Toledo dual meet. Now that the meet is over, I can drop the impartiality act and tell you how this BG alum really feels. Final score: Toledo 100, Bowling Green 99. I walked out of the stadium kinda like this, but angrier and more bitter:

My team lost to their rivals by one point. One point.

I also got a chance to inaugurate a traveling trophy for the meet. That’s a true rarity in college track.

One of the really fun things about college football is the existence of traveling trophies. Things like the Little Brown Jug, the Jeweled Shillelagh, the Keg of Nails. These physical representations of the intense rivalries that drive much of college football’s appeal are ubiquitous, and they’re fun things for the winning team to carry off the field in celebration.

Some trophies are better than others. BG and Toledo used to play for the Peace Pipe, a trinket brought out in 1948 because it was the first time the two teams had played since a riot broke out after the 1935 game. It was eventually phased out, partly because the NCAA discouraged Native American imagery, but mostly because it was stolen and never found. In 2011 the “Battle of I-75” trophy was inaugurated and it looks about as exciting as a calculus lecture. Yuck.

The best trophies are organic, and by that I mean they are designed by passion or happenstance rather than a committee. For example, the Old Oaken Bucket that Indiana and Purdue pass back and forth really is an old oaken bucket, taken from a farm out in the middle of nowhere in Indiana in 1925. The Iron Skillet (TCU vs SMU) supposedly came from a pre-game prank in the 1940s.

Great trophy, or the greatest trophy?

But without a doubt, the absolute most fun, most organic, most created-off-the-cuff trophy in college sports is the $5 Bits of Broken Chair Trophy. Created by some Minnesota fans for their new rivalry with Nebraska after a silly Twitter exchange between Goldy Gopher and Faux Pelini,, it personifies the joy of being young and in college. SB Nation has the story on its creation.

I thought very deeply about all of this while trying to figure out what to use for a rivalry trophy. I didn’t want to commission a trophy to be created in some shop because a) it lacks authenticity, but more importantly b) it costs money, which I was not really interested in spending.

I settled on a rock plucked from the bottom of the Maumee River. The river, the largest single tributary to the Great Lakes system, forms the boundary between Wood County (Bowling Green) and Lucas County (Toledo). The river is not just a boundary, it’s also a resource used heavily by the entire community. It both divides and joins the two counties, so it’s a symbol of the things that both divide and join the two teams. That’s what rivalries are about. Teams become rivals not because they are different but because they are alike. The stone weights a bit over 50 pounds and will have the team names engraved on opposite sides, so that the winner can display theirs while smashing the other’s into the dirt.

Existing Rivalry Trophies

There are very few traveling trophies in college track and field, and as in football they range from the ordinary to the sublime. Time to hand out grades!

Passing Grade: At least they have one

Ohio State v Michigan

Ohio State and Michigan had a dual meet rivalry going for a few years, and they ran for this flimsy cloth pennant. It looks like something you could have picked up for $6.99 at Party City. Lame! They need to go to office hours and tutoring.
Grade: C-

Kansas v Kansas State v Wichita State

Kansas, Kansas State, and Wichita State compete in an annual indoor triangular known as the “Sunflower Showdown”. The trophy is, well, a trophy. Yawn.
Grade: C

Minnesota v Wisconsin

(Photo courtesy Becky Miller)
Wisconsin and Minnesota have renewed their dual meet rivalry which had laid dormant for decades. The football teams have some of the greatest trophies ever–they used to play for the Slab of Bacon and now play for a dangerous weapon. The track teams play for a trophy. That’s OK, I guess. At least it’s kind of snazzy.
Grade: C+

Illinois State v Indiana State

Indiana State and Illinois State run for the Coughlan-Malloy Cup, which is a real cup and is named after retired coaches from the two institutions. This year’s meet came just weeks after the sudden death of Indiana State coach John McNichols, and the Sycamores retained the cup in an emotional win. A cup is more visually impressive than a trophy, so they get some credit for that.
Grade: B-

Honor Roll for Creativity

The Little Three

The cross country teams at Franklin & Marshall, Dickinson, and Gettysburg (aka “the Little Three”) run for the Napoleon Cannon Trophy, which is a miniature cannon atop a trophy. Weirder is better when it comes to rivalry trophies, and we’re moving that direction.
Grade: B

Case Western v Carnegie Mellon

Division III is often where the weirdest things happen in college sports and that’s true when it comes to track and field rivalry trophies. Case Western Reserve and Carnegie-Mellon compete for an obelisk. Why an obelisk? Nobody remembers. The best trophies are the ones that don’t make any sense at all, like this one.
Grade: B+

Carleton v St. Olaf

Better yet are the trophies passed back and forth between MIAC crosstown rivals Carleton and St. Olaf. Their cross country reserve teams meet at the end of the year for the Karhu Shoe trophy, but this track trophy is sheer genius. In a spoof of Rolex’s sponsorship of the small-college tennis championship, several years ago a former coach picked up a counterfeit Rolex from the streets of New York and made a trophy out of it. Since spring is short in Minnesota, the meet is held the week prior to the MIAC Championships. For that reason the coaches wanted to keep the rivalry but stress individual competition instead of heavy team responsibilities. At the end of the meet, one event is drawn at random. Whichever team won the event wins the meet and the “Rolex” trophy.
Grade: A

Magna Cum Laude

Coastal Carolina v UNC-Wilmington

There is no doubt in my mind as to which is the best dual meet trophy out there. UNC-Wilmington and Coastal Carolina go head-to-head every year in a meet they call the “Battle of the Beaches”. The winner takes home this mini-surfboard trophy. Now this is the real deal. If I was 20 years old again, I’d run until I bled so my team and I could carry this off the track.
Grade: A

Proposed dual meet trophies

There are established rivalries out there which lack a trophy. For example, the Cactus Cup rivalry between Angelo State, Tarleton State, and Texas A&M-Kingsville does not award a cup to the winner. Neither does the Carolina Cup between Duke, North Carolina, NC State, and East Carolina. Here are some suggestions.

Arizona vs Arizona State

For decades this was a three-way rivalry that included Northern Arizona, but they withdrew a few years ago leaving this meet to the state’s two major programs. I have seen a reference to the first dual meet being held in 1908 (four years before Arizona was admitted as a state) but detailed records are difficult or impossible to find. Since this is a clash between teams from the north and the south, perhaps the traveling trophy should include something from the O.K. Corral.

South Dakota vs South Dakota State

Despite being an obvious in-state rivalry, as a dual meet this has a spotty history. Most of South Dakota’s famous landmarks – Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, Sturgis – are in the western portion of the state, hundreds of miles from the two campuses. Much closer is Mitchell, location of the world-famous Corn Palace. A scaled-down version of Cornelius, the palace’s grinning mascot, would be a great traveling trophy.

Washington State vs Washington

This meet is coming up on Sunday. The football version of the rivalry is known as the Apple Cup and has a suitable but uninteresting trophy. The track meet needs something track- and Washington-centric. At first I thought we should make Paul Merca the traveling trophy, since he is the master of all things track and field in the Evergreen State, but that wouldn’t work unless we could get a magician to saw him in half in the years when the men’s and women’s teams split the wins. Instead, I suggest a Washington Apple cocktail.

Detroit Mercy vs Oakland

This is a friendly rivalry, but the areas they represent have their tensions. UDM is obviously inside the city of Detroit, while Oakland University is in the northern suburb of Rochester Hills. 8 Mile Road is the dividing line between the city and the northern suburbs and the differences between the two areas can be stark, even just across the road from each other. People all over the country were made aware of this in the 2002 film 8 Mile. Thus my suggestion for a traveling trophy is an Eminem bobblehead.

Michigan vs Duke vs North Carolina

This is a relatively new triangular and is known as the “Battle of the Blues”. Couldn’t the winning team just take possession of one of the guys from the Blue Man Group? I mean, they’re well past their peak and should come pretty cheap these days.

Harvard vs Yale

The Crimson and the Elis first met in 1890, making this the oldest dual meet rivalry in American collegiate track and field (Oxford and Cambridge’s “Varsity Match” began 26 years earlier). Given the two universities’ overrepresentation in institutions such as Goldman Sachs, the trophy should be obvious: a golden parachute.

Cal vs Stanford

“The Big Meet” is the second-oldest US dual meet rivalry, behind only Harvard-Yale. Stanford is now a nationally-competitive program, and in fact the Cardinal has scored more points at the NCAA Championships since 2010 than any other program in the state of California – but it wasn’t always that way. Stanford was a Pac-10 bottom feeder through the 70s and 80s, but one of then-AD Ted Leland’s first hires was a distance specialist out of Dartmouth named Vin Lananna who changed all of that. When Stanford broke Cal’s 25-year win streak in the 1997 edition of The Big Meet, Lananna made good on a promise and allowed the team to shave off his trademark beard right there on the track. The perfect traveling trophy for this meet would be a bag of Vin Lananna’s beard hair.

The post Rivalry Trophies in College Track appeared first on Daily Relay.

Track meets can often take all day, and you probably don’t have all day to sit and watch every single race. Here are the ones to carve out some time for.

1. Boston Marathon Men’s Race

Monday, 10:00am EDT
Hokinton to Boston, MA
Race website
TV coverage from 8:30am on NBC Sports Network

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. In ancient times the long-awaited arrival of spring was celebrated with Floralia and Walpurgis Night, and in modern times with the annual start to outdoor sports. Two Mondays ago the nation’s baseball fans made sure they got away from work, and the nation’s track and running fans do the same every Patriot’s Day. The Boston Marathon isn’t “just” a race, it’s a celebration.

This year’s race offers lots to celebrate. Olympic bronze medalist Galen Rupp is figured as a very real contender for the win, although questions remain about his health and fitness due to a foot injury. This will be Meb Keflezighi‘s swan song at Boston, and while you wouldn’t figure a 41-year-old on his retirement tour would be a contender, he has always been full of surprises. The rest of the American entries are unusually strong given that they’re “the rest of the American entries”, led by Olympic sixth-placer Jared Ward.

The foreign entries are strong as always as well. Defending champion Lemi Berhanu Hayle is back, plus four others with sub-2:05 PRs (Emmanuel Mutai, Sammy Kitwara, Yemane Tsegay, Dino Sefir). If an American wins, it most certainly will not be gifted to him.

Note that while NBC Sports Network is the official national broadcaster of the Boston Marathon, the local CBS station also has local broadcast rights and streams the race at their website. While NBCSN does a good job of covering the race, the local broadcast is often better and their lead announcer is Toni Reavis, the best in the business in the USA. It may or may not be blocked for those outside the Boston area, but it’s worth checking.

2. Boston Marathon Women’s Race

Monday, 9:32am EDT

Every Monday morning I meet a bunch of friends for breakfast. Six years ago one of them said “I hear there’s an American woman who could win Boston today.” He was speaking of Kara Goucher because USA Today had published a story on her that morning. I replied that there was an American who could win it, but it’s wasn’t Goucher. I was speaking of then-little-known Desi Linden, and I was right that she had a chance. She came up just a few steps short of the win.

She will not catch anyone by surprise this year if she is able to battle for the win. Marathon rookie Jordan Hasay has been running very well on the roads and she could be a contender as well. The withdrawal of Shalane Flanagan due to injury suggests these are the only two Americans who could challenge for the win. The favorites among the foreign entries are Edna Kiplagat, Joyce Chepkirui, Atsede Bayisa, and Rose Chelimo.

3. Mt. SAC Relays Men’s 100 meters

Saturday, 2:36pm PDT (5:36pm EDT)
Murdock Stadium, Torrance CA
Meet website
Live webcast via Flotrack (subscription required)

The Mt. SAC Relays are in the second of a two-year trip away from the junior college’s campus in Walnut while Hilmer Lodge Stadium is undergoing a much-needed upgrade. Once completed, it will be capable of hosting the Olympic Trials and other major championships. Southern California was once the epicenter of track and field in the United States (as it was in sports and popular culture in general) but now this is the only major meet left in the area.

I keep a personal “power ranking” for US/Canadian/NCAA athletes in each event, and this is a very good early season race for the 100 meters. (Color coding for Coleman and Williams indicate their collegiate affiliations of Tennessee and Georgia.) Heat #1 of the men’s invitational 100 meters will include #2, #4, #5, and #10 in my power rankings. De Grasse is widely expected to be The Next Big Thing in sprinting.

4. Mt. SAC Relays Men’s 800 meters

Saturday, 2:55pm PDT (5:55pm EDT)

Despite Donavan Brazier’s 1:44.63 last week, I’d say the USA’s two best half-milers at this moment are Clayton Murphy and Erik Sowinski, and they will race head-to-head in the second heat. Also in the heat is Duane Solomon, whose last major race was his crash-and-burn at the 2015 USA Championships, and two top collegians from Middle Tennessee State, Eliud Rutto and Sampson Laari.

5. Mt. SAC Relays Women’s 200 meters

Saturday, 4:45pm PDT (7:45pm EDT)

This race is even deeper than the men’s invitational 100 meters and is somewhat of an NCAA Championships preview. Heat #2 will include current Oregon Ducks Stevens, Washington, and Cunliffe plus Oregon alum Prandini, along with USC’s Hill. All of them are in the top ten of my US/Canada/NCAA power rankings for the 200 shown at right. Natasha Hastings, one of the USA’s best 400 runners, will also be in the race.

6. Mt. SAC Relays Women’s 4×100

Saturday, 1:15pm PDT (4:15pm EDT)

Mt. SAC is one of the few big meets that run “open” (professional) and college relay teams together. Oregon already broke the collegiate record two weeks ago with 42.34, but the LSU Tigers have also posted one of the fastest times ever (42.66) just last week. They’ll be in lanes 7 and 4 respectively (with a very fast Oregon “B” team in lane 5), and lane 6 will be occupied by an quartet of Bobby Kersee-coached athletes, including Allyson Felix.

7. Bryan Clay Invitational men’s 1500 meters

Friday, 7:15pm PDT (10:15pm EDT)
Cougar Athletics Stadium, Azusa CA
Meet website
Live webcast via Flotrack (subscription required)

Flotrack is breathlessly hyping this as an “NCAA Rematch” between Oregon’s umpteen-time NCAA champion Edward Cheserek and New Mexico’s Josh Kerr, the man who upset him at the NCAA indoor championships last month. The problem is that it’s entirely possible that “Ches” doesn’t show up to the starting line. He and three Oregon teammates are entered in both this race and the invitational 1500 at the Mt. SAC Relays, scheduled for about an hour earlier. They’re not running both races.

It’s still going to be a good race even if the quartet of Oregon Ducks drop out. A pair of NCAA Championship favorites are entered in Kerr and Ole Miss’s Craig Engels, and they’re not even the biggest names in the race. Three top pros from the Bowerman Track Club are opening up their outdoor season: Dan Huling, Mo Ahmed, and Ryan Hill.

8. B.A.A. 5k

Saturday, 9:30am
Boston Common
Live webcast at baa.org

Marathon weekend is a big deal in Boston and some shorter races are held on Saturday. The headline names in the men’s elite field for the 5k are Ben True, Dejen Gebremeskel, and Stephen Sambu. True had a rough year by his standards in 2016 but is still capable of beating nearly anyone when things are going right for him. Gebremeskel is one of the few men to beat Mo Farah on the track in the last six years, and Sambu is among the steadiest road racers around.

The women’s race includes Molly Huddle, America’s steadiest all-around runner, who hasn’t lost on the roads at any distance shorter than a marathon since October 2014. Her toughest competition is likely to be Ethiopian Buze Deriba.

9. B.A.A Invitational Mile

Saturday, 12:50pm
Boston Marathon finish line
Live webcast at baa.org

The mile races on Saturday are invitation-only rather than mass-participation. The men’s race is probably going to come down to former Montana State All-American Cristian Soratos, whose indoor season was highlighted by a 3:54.23 mile, and Canadian veteran Nate Brannen.

The overwhelming women’s favorite is Ethiopia’s Dawit Sayaum, who was eighth in the Olympic 1500 final last summer. Canadian Nicole Sifuentes, American Lauren Johnson, Kenyan Viola Lagat, and South African Dominique Scott-Erfurd are the best of the rest.

10. Old-school Ivy League duals

You will only be able to see these meets in person, since neither of them are

At Philadelphia’s Franklin Field on Saturday, a combined Penn & Cornell team will take on a combined Oxford & Cambridge team in a transatlantic series that dates to 1894. Field events begin at 10:00am, running events at 11:00am.

Just a few hours later, Yale comes to Harvard for a dual meet (field events at noon, running events at 1:30pm) to continue the oldest rivalry in US college track. They’ve been going at it since 1891 and the Harvard men will seek to avenge their three-point loss from last year. Yale’s women will try to break a nine-year losing streak.

The post Ten Races to Watch This Weekend appeared first on Daily Relay.

That does not mean I think the weekend’s competition is repetitive. It’s actually quite good, and different than what will happen next weekend, or any weekend for the next month. The competitions to watch over Friday and Saturday are the Texas Relays and Florida Relays. The first is getting wall-to-wall coverage on the Longhorn Network, so don’t miss it if you get that channel. The second is also getting broad coverage on ESPN3, so check that out too.

Relay carnivals like these are all-day parties of track and field at all levels and are great fun to attend. But if you’re seeing it at home you probably don’t have all day to sit around watching track. So you might want to zero in on some highlights.

If you’re going to make appointment viewing, here are my suggestions (all times Eastern):

But I’m not here to preview those meets. I’m here to take a look at two rising high school stars, Vernon Turner and Mondo Duplantis.

Turner, who attends Yukon High School in Oklahoma, high jumped 7′ 5″ last Saturday. He jumped 7′ 4½” last year, so this is not a shocking development, but it is an extremely good jump for late March. Only five high schoolers have ever gone higher than 7′ 5″ at any time of the year, so talk of pursuing the national high school record of 7′ 7″ is more than mere speculation. It would be fascinating to see what he could do against the best collegians at the Texas Relays this weekend–I think he’s capable of beating them–but unfortunately he won’t be there.

The other top high schooler I’m talking about is pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis, a junior at Lafayette High School in Louisiana. He has been on a tear this winter and already has the national high school record — in fact, he’s beaten the old record five times during the indoor season. He’ll be in the Texas Relays invitational division (Saturday at 3:45pm ET) and his opponents include Shawn Barber, a former Texas high schooler and national high school record holder who won the 2015 World Championships gold medal. Compare their indoor seasons, and I’d have to say that Barber is actually the underdog on Saturday.

When we look at great high schoolers, we often start thinking about what they can do in the future. We imagine them as international stars who can compete for and win medals at things like the Olympics and World Championships. It’s only natural, after all.

But is it realistic? For every star youngster who turns out to be the real deal, such as Ryan Crouser, there are many more who never accomplish much as adults, such as Obea Moore or Tim Danielson.

If there’s one thing that we’re good at in track and field, it’s keeping records and analyzing them. An analysis of the best high school boys’ high jumpers and pole vaulters of all time suggests that we should be careful with our expectations.

HIGH JUMP
These are the top fifteen high school high jumpers in history, and what they did after high school. “Highlight” means best career achievement. “Best rankings” are the Track & Field News annual rankings.

The jury is still out on two of the fifteen boys listed above since they’re both still teenagers. (Vernon is the topic of conversation here, and Carbin is a freshman at Georgia where he finished 7th at the NCAA indoor championships and has not yet broken his high school PR.) Of the other thirteen, only one (Kynard) ever became a USA champion, and only two others made Olympic teams. Only Kynard, Manson, and Noji ever became competitive on an international level. Two of the thirteen more or less disappeared after high school.

Conclusion: being a great high school high jumper has little to do with eventual career success.

Pole Vault

A few things jump out as being different in the pole vault. One is that while there are also two on the list who are still teenagers, they’re at the top of the list. (Nilsen is a freshman at South Dakota and was the NCAA indoor champion with a new PR height.) Another is that more of these great high school pole vaulters went on to national and international success than did the high school high jumpers.

Even more significant is that there is a significant difference between the top and bottom of the list. Barber has already been a world champion, and while Tommy Skipper never quite made it internationally he did win seven NCAA championships. Dial and Manson were near the top of the list when they graduated from high school (in 1981 and ’86 respectively) and they were internationally competitive.

Conclusion: being a great high school pole vaulter has some bearing on future success, but is hardly a guarantee.

Duplantis is different

That conclusion about pole vaulters doesn’t exactly fit the situation Mondo Duplantis is in right now. He’s already world-class. He’s currently #7 on the 2017 world list and only 4 cm (2 inches) below #2 — who happens to be Thiago Braz, the reigning Olympic champion. More importantly, Duplantis has shown remarkable consistency during the indoor season, more so than virtually any of the top professionals. At this point I would say he is more than capable of winning a medal at August’s World Championships.

For whatever reason, it seems to capture the media’s attention when a high school athlete is competitive with the world’s best. Remember Mary Cain and Cainsanity? Looking back further, Alan Webb got loads of attention when he ran a 3:53 mile in 2001, with an appearance on David Letterman’s show and a live breakaway from ESPN’s Sportscenter to cover the 1500 at the USA Championships. “Little” Mary Decker was a print media darling of the 1970s. And going back even further, schoolboys Jim Ryun and Gerry Lindgren lit up the nation in the 60s.

Duplantis already more competitive on a world stage than Webb was in high school, and at the same level as Cain or maybe better. Why isn’t he getting mobbed with attention? One reason is that he competes in a field event, which TV producers routinely ignore. But a bigger reason is that he will not represent the USA in international competition. He has dual US/Swedish citizenship and has chosen to compete for his mother’s homeland rather than the USA. And for good or ill, what really drives interest in this sport is national team affiliation.

What should we expect?

Like I said above, the fun thing about meets like the Texas Relays and Florida Relays is that they are big parties of track and field. They combine high school, college, and elite competition into one big package. When you go out and see high school kids compete, the most important thing to remember is that they are just that: kids. Take what high schoolers do at face value, without thought for the future. I mean, it’s what’s high schoolers themselves do. When I was a teenager, long-term planning for me was looking towards the next month. If Duplantis can knock off the reigning World Champion, appreciate it for what it is in the here and now.

The post What Should We Expect From Two High School Stars? appeared first on Daily Relay.

When we last left our heroes, we had dynamic duos (and trios and more) racing to the finish line…

…while the villain webcasters plotted against us with bad announcing, brainless pre-produced pieces instead of racing, and a complete field event blackout.

Quick, Robin, to the Batpoles!

Important Links

The start lists and live results are available via FlashResults.com. All kinds of other nifty info is available at the USTFCCCA website.

The meet will be live on ESPN3.com from 4:55pm ET. Those jokers could have started 30 minutes earlier and shown the conclusion of the men’s heptathlon, but that would have foiled their evil plot to webcast a track and field meet while showing as little track and field as possible.

Who are the leading teams?

The NCAA Championships are fun because you get two meets in one. There are individual event championships, and the team competition ties everything together nicely too.

Historically, every NCAA indoor team champion has come from the top six of the final pre-meet USTFCCCA computer rankings, as well as 90% of the trophy-winning top four. Holy prognostication, Batman!

The Bat-Computer has been hard at work crunching the numbers for today’s competition. Here are those top six teams, their current score, and their remaining scoring opportunities. Events in which a team is not expected to score are in italics, while bold indicates events where the team is expected to finish in the top three.

MEN

Clearly, it’s not clear. Florida, Arkansas, and Oregon have combined for 27 of the last 33 men’s indoor championships and it appears likely to stay that way. Which of them will win it? That riddle will not be solved until tonight.

WOMEN

Oregon had a few missteps yesterday, including a third-place finish in an event they were expected to win (the distance medley) and a DQ of one of the strongest favorites in the meet (Deajah Stevens in the 200). Still, they just have so many chances to pile up big points that their title seems inevitable. Georgia had a very good day yesterday and will get their point total into the 50s, but can’t go much higher than that.

The Schedule

The visual schedule below is not complete — the afternoon action not shown includes the heptathlon hurdles and pole vault and the men’s weight throw final — but it does give you a handy reference of which of those top teams above are in which events. (The red A on a white background is Arkansas, the grey A on a scarlet background is Alabama.)

Heptathlon: Tim Duckworth (Kentucky) and Linden Victor (Texas A&M) are battling it out.

Women’s Mile: Kaela Edwards (Oklahoma State) is the favorite but don’t sleep on Elinor Purrier (New Hampshire). Arkansas has two finalists trying for points.

Men’s Mile: Edward Cheserek (Oregon) is almost assuredly going to win this, but after that it’s unpredictable.

Women’s 60 meters: Hannah Cunliffe (Oregon) broke the collegiate record earlier this year, and with two teammates in the final this is where her Ducks start their flight to the championship.

Men’s 60 meters: I have no idea what is going to happen in this race.

Women’s Triple Jump: Keturah Orji (Georgia) is the best athlete in the meet, period. Kentucky is looking for points.

Women’s 400 meters: Shakima Wimbley (Miami) is the favorite and has the most advantageous lane draw, which makes a big difference in this event.

Men’s 400 meters: Six of the eight finalists are on teams with a shot at a trophy. Four of them run for Arkansas and Florida, two of the three teams who have a shot at the championship.

Women’s 60 hurdles: Another women’s race with Oregon as the favorite, this time Sasha Wallace. NCAA outdoor champion Jasmine Camacho-Quinn (Kentucky) did not run well in the semis but if you’re on the starting line you have a chance.

Men’s 60 hurdles: This is still looking like a battle between Grant Holloway (Florida) and Chad Zallow (Youngstown State). The last time they met in an indoor championship final, Holloway won by mere thousandths of a second.

Men’s High Jump: The favorites are Randall Cunningham (USC) and Clayton Brown (Florida). Arkansas is hoping for some points out of Ken Legassey.

Women’s 800 meters: The battle lines are drawn: the new collegiate record holder (Jasmine Fray, Texas A&M) versus a three-time NCAA champion (Raevyn Rogers, Oregon).

Men’s 800 meters: The 800 is inherently unpredictable, even more so indoors. Isaiah Harris (Penn State) and Emmanuel Korir (UTEP) are the favorites but take that with a grain of salt.

Women’s 200 meters: If Oregon hasn’t clinched the title by this race, they will right here.

Men’s 200 meters: There are three favorites: Christian Coleman (Tennessee), Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake (LSU), and Jereem Richards (Alabama). Unfortunately they are not all in the same heat.

Women’s 3000: In yesterday’s 5000 meters, Karissa Schweizer (Missouri) toyed with the field before running away for a big win. The same is expected here, but the competition includes some new foes, including Katie Rainsberger (Oregon) and Erin Clark (Colorado).

Women’s Pole Vault: Arkansas is very capable of a 1-2 finish with the Weeks sisters, Tori and Lexi.

Women’s Weight Throw: Raven Saunders (Ole Miss) broke her own collegiate record yesterday and could complete the throwing double, but the favorite is her teammate Janaeh Stewart.

Men’s 3000: The only man in this race who I think can challenge Edward Cheserek (Oregon) is Justyn Knight (Syracuse). This race is Oregon’s last scoring opportunity and they would need at least a ten-point lead over Arkansas, Florida, and Texas A&M.

Women’s 4×400: It’s virtually unthinkable that Oregon won’t have the meet won by this point, but if they don’t they’re still in the fast heat and have a chance to win.

Men’s Triple Jump: This is a make-or-break event for both Florida (KeAndre Bates, Clayton Brown) and Arkansas (Clive Pullen).

Men’s 4×400: There is a very good chance that the team title is in play. Arkansas is in the second of three heats and is expected to score but not much. Florida is in the fast heat and could win, but they’ve got their hands full with Texas A&M, who set the collegiate record earlier this year and is running at home.

The post Saturday Viewer’s Guide to the NCAA Indoor Championships appeared first on Daily Relay.

Since there is so much action going on, we’re just giving you a quick-and-dirty fan’s guide to the action.

How to watch

The meet is taking place on Friday and Saturday evenings at Texas A&M’s Gilliam Indoor Track Stadium. You can watch the meet live via ESPN3.com (provided you are a cable subscriber) and can follow the live results at FlashResults.com. The USTFCCCA’s website has a whole bunch of other interesting links to follow.

Who are the team favorites?

The USTFCCCA’s computer rankings are based on “national championships scoring potential” and have a history of accuracy.

The association first started its rankings in 2008, giving us 18 indoor championship meets it has predicted (9 each for men and women). The team championship is the most important prize, but the NCAA also gives out trophies to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place teams. Here’s how the ranking results break down.

CHAMPIONS
Ten of 18 NCAA indoor team champions (56%) were ranked #1 going into the meet.
Another four (22%) were ranked #2.
All champions were ranked in the top six.

TROPHY WINNERS
74% of top-four teams were ranked in the top four going into the meet.
90% of top-four teams were ranked in the top six going into the meet.

The above strongly suggests that the top six teams in the USTFCCCA rankings are the ones to watch. They are:

Those top six teams above are noted in the visual schedule below. For example, you can see that the women’s 60 meter semifinals are a big event in the team competition while the women’s shot put is not. (The red A on a white background is Arkansas, the gray A on a scarlet background is Alabama.)

Event by Event

Athletes on the Bowerman Award watch list are marked with an asterisk.*

Pentathlon: The multi-events, the men’s heptathlon and women’s pentathlon, will be ongoing all day and following them is a fun way to kill time on a Friday afternoon at work. The pentathlon will be coming to its conclusion right after the whistle blows and Fred yells “Yabba dabba doo!”.

The basics are this: Kendal Williams* (Georgia) is heavily favored to win. If Arkansas is going to have any shot at the women’s team title, they’re going to have to score big.

Women’s Shot Put: Raven Saunders* (Ole Miss), fifth at last summer’s Olympics, is considered all but unbeatable.

Women’s Mile semis: Kaela Edwards* (Oklahoma State) is the favorite, Arkansas is trying to get two to the final. Let’s Run has a deep preview.

Men’s Mile semis: Edward Cheserek* (Oregon) might be running three races today, this is the first. He’ll be trying to drag two teammates to the final. Other than Ches, this is a pretty wide-open event. Let’s Run has a deep preview.

Women’s 60 semis: Hannah Cunliffe* (Oregon) broke the collegiate record earlier this year. There are nine qualifiers from teams contending for the title and/or a trophy but only eight will get to the final.

Men’s 60 semis: Christian Coleman* (Tennessee) and Kendall Williams (Georgia) are the favorites. It would be a surprise if Oregon’s Kyree King made the final.

Women’s 400 semis: There is no real favorite in this race.

Men’s Long Jump: The men’s long jump should be entering its final rounds somewhere around this point, and it will play a massive part in determining the team champion.

Men’s 400 semis: Fred Kerley* (Texas A&M) has run stunningly fast this year. The first heat could make a huge impact on the team battle.

Women’s 60 hurdle semis: Sasha Wallace* (Oregon) is the favorite, although Jasmine Camacho-Quinn (Kentucky) is the reigning NCAA champion in the outdoor 100 hurdles. The unpredictable nature of the hurdles means the Oregon Ducks could give themselves a big leg up in the team competition or leave the door open for challengers.

Men’s 60 hurdle semis: Grant Holloway* (Florida) and Chad Zallow (Youngstown State) are the favorites.

Women’s 800 semis: The 800 is the least predictable of the distance races. Jasmine Fray* (Texas A&M) broke the collegiate record last month, Raevyn Rogers* (Oregon) is a 3-time NCAA champion. Let’s Run has a deeper look.

Men’s 800 semis: I love semis in the 800, they are madness. Emmanuel Korir* (UTEP) briefly held the 600 meter world record two months ago, while Craig Engels (Ole Miss) is coming back from injury. Let’s Run has a deeper look.

Men’s Pole Vault: Chris Nilsen* (South Dakota) is the favorite but this is among the most fickle of events.

Women’s 200 semis: Oregon has unparalleled depth in this event with Hannah Cunliffe* and Ariana Washington*.

Men’s 200 semis: Alabama has a new find in Jereem Richards, but Christian Coleman* (Tennessee) is the one with experience.

Women’s High Jump: This event should be reaching its conclusion around the time the distance finals begin. Georgia has the top two entries.

Women’s 5000 meter final: Let’s Run says “Erin Finn [Michigan] & Katie Rainsberger [Oregon] Try to Stop NCAA XC Champ Karissa Schweizer [Missouri] from Pulling Off the Distance Double”.

Men’s 5000 meter final: Edward Cheserek* (Oregon) is the heavy favorite, but the real questions will be sorted out after this race.

Women’s Long Jump: This event should be wrapping up somewhere during the 5ks or DMRs. Shakeela Saunders* (Kentucky) is the favorite, and just like in the men’s long jump, this event will play a large role in which teams grab which trophies.

Women’s Distance Medley Final: Oregon broke the collegiate record last month, while Arkansas and LSU are looking to max out on points.

Men’s Shot Put: Egyptian Mostafa Hassan* (Colorado State) has emerged as the favorite.

Men’s Distance Medley Final: Will Edward Chesarek* (Oregon) double back from the 5000 like he did last year? Can anyone beat Oregon if he does? Will Oregon get enough points to challenge for the championship? And will it kill Ches’ legs if he tries? As Desmond Doomsday used to tell us, “Answers…tomorrow night! Same Bat-time! Same Bat-Channel!”

The post Friday Viewer’s Guide to the NCAA Indoor Championships appeared first on Daily Relay.

Oregon’s Edward Cheserek is entered in four events at this weekend’s NCAA Indoor Championships. It’s not clear if he will run all four–he may or may not run on the distance medley–but it’s certainly starting some chatter.

Changes in scheduling, especially at the NCAA Outdoor Championships, have renewed the significance of the single-day double (and even triple or quadruple). Being a history-minded guy, I decided to find out what some of the all-time great single-day efforts were in college track. Below is what I found.

The greatest? That’s obvious.

Gold: Jesse Owens, May 25, 1935

Jesse Owens of Ohio State University crosses the finish line in the 220-yard dash with a record speed of 20.3 seconds at the Big Ten Western Conference Track and Field meet at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., May 25, 1935. Owens, nicknamed “Buckeye Bullet,” broke three world records, including the 220-yard hurdle, 22.6; and the long jump, 26 feet, 1/4 inches. He tied the 100-yard dash record, 9.4 seconds. (AP Photo)

It’s been called The Greatest 45 Minutes in Sports History and for good reason. In three-quarters of an hour at the 1935 Big Ten Championships, Owens tied one world record and broke three more. Richard Rothschild for Sports Illustrated:

Owens’ one-day blockbuster in Ann Arbor has no parallel, not only in track and field but in any sport. It is the greatest single day performance in athletic history, superior to Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point outburst or to the Redskins’ Sammy Baugh throwing four touchdown passes and adding an NFL record four interceptions in one game.

Owens had fallen earlier in the week and injured his back, and his participation in the meet was unsure. He and coach Larry Snyder decided to take it one event at a time.

3:15pm: Owens won the 100 yards in 9.4

3:25pm: Owens took just one jump, a new world record of 26’ 8¼”. The distance stayed as the world record for 25 years, and stood as the Ohio State school record until Mike Hartfield broke it in 2011.

3:34pm: Owens won the 220 yards in a new world record of 20.3

4:00pm: Owens won the 220 yard hurdles in a new world record of 22.6

Despite Owens’ best efforts, Ohio State came up 4½ points short of the team title to the host Wolverines. He put up several more big one-day efforts in 1935 and 1936, including a pair of quadruple victories at the NCAA Championships.

Silver: Renaldo Nehemiah, April 29, 1979

Renaldo Nehemiah lacked a phone booth and a cape today. He wasn’t much slower than a speeding bullet, though, as he carried Maryland to three relay championships with as blazing a display of speed as the Penn Relays have ever seen.

So wrote Robert Fachet for the Washington Post.

“Skeets” started off the day with his only easy win, anchoring the shuttle hurdle relay. Back then they ran it on the infield astroturf and wet conditions made the time unimpressive…for Nehemiah. 13.3 was fast for any other collegian and still is.

Next came the 4×200 meter relay, where Nehemiah got the baton fifteen meters behind and split 19.4 to bring his Terrapins to victory. “I was shocked to see the way he made up ground on a kid like that [LSU’s Orlando McDaniel] as effortlessly as he did,” said Maryland coach Frank Costello. “I should know better, because he’s done so many things.”

An hour later, Nehemiah’s last task of the day was anchoring the 4×400 relay. He was 25 meters behind Villanova’s Tim Dale and 20 behind Tennessee’s Antoine Blair. At the exchange, former Penn Athletic Director Fred Shabel said “He isn’t God — he can’t win this one.” Nehemiah himself said “I was kind of down when I got the stick. Both the Tennessee and Villanova anchors are capable of 45, so I just wanted to make it respectable.” Skeets got it close, and then took the lead off the final turn and brought home one last Championship of America trophy. His split was 44.3.

A week later Nehemiah lowered his own 110 meter hurdles world record to 13.00, and another four weeks later he ran a wind-aided 12.91 at the NCAA Championships.

Bronze: Andre De Grasse, June 12, 2015

De Grasse arrived at USC in the fall of 2014 as a little-known transfer from Coffeyville Community College. He’d only tried out for his high school track team with a month left in his senior year, but his talent was so obvious that local Toronto coach Tony Sharpe immediately took notice.

His first big accomplishment was a runner-up finish in the 200 at the NCAA indoor, then made a bigger splash with a heavily wind-aided 9.87 at the Mt. SAC Relays. Two weeks later he helped his Trojans beat archrival UCLA for the first time since 2010 with a quadruple effort, and two weeks after that he won a Pac-12 triple in the 4×100, 100 (9.97) and 200 (20.05), very nearly becoming the first collegian to ever run sub-10.00 and sub-20.00 in a single day.

It was at the NCAA Championships where he went nuts. The sprints were expected to be a showdown between De Grasse and Trayvon Bromell, the young Baylor star who had run several wind-aided sub-10 efforts. But the races weren’t close. De Grasse won the 100 by a massive 0.13 seconds with a wind-aided 9.75. The 200 was even more ridiculous; he led from the gun and ran a barely-wind-aided 19.58, the fastest time in Hayward Field history. If we use a standard calculator to factor out the wind, the times were equivalent to 9.87 and 19.72. Add in his second leg on the fourth-place 4×100 and it was the greatest one-day display of sprint power in college history.

Also in the final…

4. Henry Rono, June 1, 1978

Thanks to TFN editor Garry Hill for reminding me of this one.
Long-distance types like Rono rarely do big one-day doubles since their races are almost universally scheduled for different days. Rono was different than most, though. The Washington State star planned on a triple at the 1978 NCAA Outdoor Championships, and the schedule back in the men-only days of the 70s meant his qualifying heats in the steeplechase and 5000 were both on the meet’s opening day. Of course, he did it as only Rono would.

Dave Kayfes wrote for the Eugene Register-Guard:

What Rono did in his preliminary heats is more than what anyone, including Oregon’s Steve Prefontaine and WSU’s own Gerry Lindgren, could do in any NCAA Finals. His 8:18.63 in the first of three heats in the steeplechase was better than the meet record 8:24.86 by James Munyala of El Paso in 1976, and three seconds better than any American has ever run. His 13:21.79 time in the second of two 5000-meter heats also eclipsed the meet record of 13:31.4 by Prefontaine in 1972 and the [Hayward] Field record of 13:22.8 by Prefontaine, also in ’72.

Cougar head coach John Chaplin “was resorting to every slowdown hand signal he could think of trying to attract Rono’s attention and let him know he didn’t have to go so fast” — but that was actually part of Rono’s plan. He had injured his foot while breaking the steeplechase world record the previous month, and the big effort in the heats was a test. Reports are that the four hours between heats was spent in his motel, taking a shower and a nap.

He followed up this devastating display with scratches out of Friday night’s 10,000 meters and Saturday’s 5,000 final, indicating how he felt (“I felt a little limpy”), but he did win the steeplechase on Saturday in another meet record time of 8:12.39. Nearly 40 years later, his 8:18 in the heats has never been beaten by any collegian save Rono.

5. Steve Prefontaine, April 14, 1973

“Pre” ran at a time and a place where winning dual meets really mattered, and the biggest crowds came out to see the Oregon Ducks take on the UCLA Bruins. 10,000 fans flocked to Hayward Field on April 14, 1973, to see a quadrangular featuring Oregon, UCLA, Nebraska, and Washington State. “Man, this is track and field at its finest,” said Bruin coach Jim Bush. “A meet like this does so much for the sport. The crowd. Man, how great they were…We’ve just got to have this meet every year.”

UCLA rode a 2-year win streak going into this meet and barely pulled it out. As you would expect, Prefontaine attempted to push his Ducks to victory by sheer force of will. He won the mile with 3:56.4 (”I hit the three quarters in 2:58 and said, ‘Oh well’, let’s pick it up. I felt good.”).

Sixty-five minutes later came the 3-mile. “Pre wanted to get a good double,” said Duck head coach Bill Dellinger, “but I’m not sure if he knew how good the Kenyan was.” “The Kenyan” was Washington State freshman John Ngeno, the first Kenyan runner of any importance in the NCAA, who led the first two miles by as much as 25 yards. Pre’s strength pulled it out at the end for a 13:06.4 victory (roughly equal to 13:38 for 5k), capping what was then the greatest single-day distance double in world history.

6. Justin Gatlin, May 12, 2002

Gatlin only ran two years at Tennessee but was a great team player in that short time. At the 2002 Penn Relays, he ran on three winning relays in one afternoon (4×100, 4×200, shuttle hurdles) and tripled on the final day of the NCAA Championships (winning the 100 and 200 and running 44.7 on the 4×400 relay). His toughest assignment that year was at the SEC Championships, which may have been the second-greatest conference championship meet in collegiate history.

He started off the day with a second-leg carry on the winning 4×100 (38.66), then battled NCAA hurdle champ Rod Bramlett all the way to the finish line (13.41). Yes, high hurdles; everyone forgets how good he was at that event, probably the second-best in the NCAA that year. Forty minutes after that he won the 100 in 10.11 (“I was a little tired…I just wanted to win and score points”). At the end of his quadruple effort in an hour and forty-five minutes came the 200, where he surprised even himself with a collegiate record 19.86. He might have been ready for the 4×400, but the Vols didn’t need him.

7. Don Paige, June 2, 1979

Winning a distance double is tough, but it gets a lot tougher when the time between races is short. Don Paige had just 35 minutes between the 1500 and 800 at the 1979 NCAA Championships. It was the first time anyone had even tried the double since Ronnie Delany, a fellow Villanova Wildcat, pulled it off in 1958.

Paige won the first event with extreme caution, not taking the lead until 60 meters to go and winning by just 0.07 seconds, 3:39.20 to Todd Harbour’s 3:39.27. With that race under his belt plus qualifying heats in the previous two days, the 800 was tricky. “The pain began when the gun went off and I had to sprint to that first flag and cut in,” he said. “That’s when I knew I was in trouble.” He was still just sixth at 600 meters, and had to swing out to lane three off the final turn to move up. He got to the front with 50 meters to go and edged away – and, surprisingly, ran a PR of 1:46.2.

8. Edward Cheserek, March 11, 2016

A surprisingly large number of athletes have won distance doubles at the NCAA Indoor Championships, but none have done it quite like Cheserek. Instead of a mile/2-mile or its metric equivalent, Cheserek won the 5000 and distance medley, and with an insanely short amount of rest.

The first win was totally expected. He used a hard last 400 meters (57.68) to win the 5000 in a somewhat pedestrian time of 13:47.89. Only after he exited the track was it decided that he would anchor the distance medley. “I cooled down and talked to (my coach) and he said, ‘Are you sure you want to run the DMR?'” Cheserek said. “And I said ‘Why not? Let me try it.'”

The relay started just 26 minutes after the 5000 finished, and Cheserek got the baton just a step behind Washington’s Izaic Yorks, a 3:53 miler, who proceeded to take the pace out hard. Ches stuck right with him until the final lap, when he took off and got the win. His split was 3:52.84 for 1600 meters, worth roughly 3:54 for a full mile (or 3:37 for 1500). The Ducks ended up winning the meet by 23 points, making Ches’ triple (he won the next day’s 3000) just showing off.

Semifinalists…

Ralph Metcalfe, June 17, 1933

Metcalfe won single-day doubles at the NCAA Championships for three consecutive years, and in two of them he put himself in the record books in both dashes. Well, sort, of; both in 1932 and 1933 he tied or broke official world records but for some unknown reason they were not submitted for ratification.

Probably the better of the two came in 1933, where he won the 100 yards in a world-record tieing 9.4 (it was ratified as an American record), then won the 220 yards in another unratified world record of 20.4 (again, accepted as an American record). Despite two world records in one day, press reports of the meet did not highlight Metcalfe—possibly because the meet saw a total of six world records!

Wes Santee: April 10, 1954

As the star of a top-notch Midwestern team at a time when a great miler put thousands of butts in seats, Kansas’ Wes Santee ran a lot of doubles in relay and team competition. He had only one loss in his three years of running at the Texas, Kansas, and Drake Relays, and sometimes ran on four winning relays in one weekend.

The best of his multi-efforts came in an April 1954 dual meet at Cal, a meet the Golden Bears were favored to win. 13,000 fans came out to see it, but Santee and the possibility of history’s first sub-4:00 mile were probably a bigger draw than the team battle. Santee opened up the meet with a 4:05.5 mile, a time no other American had ever beaten. 40 minutes later he won the 880 in 1:51.5 (with remarkable splits of 58.8 and 52.7), which made for the best 880/mile double in world history at the time. He still had another task in front of him since the meet was tied going into the mile relay. Santee ran the third leg in 48.0, handed off in the lead, and Kansas steamed home to win the relay and the meet.

Randy Matson, April 8, 1967

Matson twice set the world record in the shot put during his career at Texas A&M, but his best single-day double effort in the shot and discus was in an April 1967 triangular against Baylor and TCU. His distances were 70′ 5½” (21.47m) and 213′ 9″ (65.16m) – just 1¾” off his own shot put world record and 2½” off Ludvik Danek’s discus world record.

Suleiman Nyambui: March 10, 1979

Dan Levin for Sports Illustrated:

As usual, Nyambui, a 22-to-28-year-old UTEP freshman from Tanzania, stood at the start wearing his deceptively sleepy expression, and, as usual, he started out way back in the pack. He hung there effortlessly on the 11-laps-to-the-mile track as if on automatic pilot, before moving into third place with three laps to go. Then, as he entered the last turn, Nyambui waved to his friends at trackside, flashed his gap-toothed grin and left almost all the other runners gasping far to the rear. His time of 8:37.87 was undistinguished, but it meant 10 more points for his team, and perhaps he had been saving himself for the mile.

UTEP was the heavy pre-meet favorite and was piling up the points, and coach Ted Banks got Nyambui ready for another race.

So with two events to go, UTEP still led 41-28 and it was Nyambui’s turn again. But Villanova had two good milers in the race—Sydney Maree, with a best time of 3:57.1, and Amos Korir, with a 3:59.3. Korir took the lead from the start and held it for a half mile. Maree was third, and Nyambui, of course, was last. Was he tired, or was he just Nyambui? At the half Maree had the lead, but at the three-quarter mark, Nyambui started moving up. By the time he approached the turn before the gun lap, Nyambui was 10 yards in front of Maree, and wildly flapping his arm at his admirers in the arena’s uppermost tiers. Nyambui won in a meet-record 3:57.89 to give UTEP a total of 51 points…

Nyambui was not the first man to win the mile/2-mile double at the NCAA Indoor Championships, but he was the first to do it in a single day. It looked like it put UTEP over the top for another team championship, but the Miners’ second-place 4×880 relay team was disqualified for interference and eight points were given back. Moments before the mile relay began, Villanova’s team learned that a win in that event would be enough to pip UTEP by a point—and that’s exactly what they did. Nyambui won the mile/2-mile double at the NCAA Indoor Championships two more times in three attempts, but this was his biggest effort and the most dramatic outcome.

Willie Gault, March 12, 1983

Gault is the only man to ever first man to win both the high hurdles and the flat sprint at the NCAA Championships, either indoors or out, and he did it on the remarkable turnaround of just ten minutes. He started off the double at the Pontiac Silverdome with an easy 6.98 win in the 60 yard hurdles (worth roughly 7.47 over 60 meters, whereas the collegiate record is 7.45). The flat 60 yards was a lot tougher; Gault got out of the blocks dead last and was still far back at 40 yards. Then he got into high gear and was among five men within a foot of each other at the finish. Officials took a long look at the finish photo before declaring Gault the winner in 6.18, the same time as runner-up Calvin Smith.

Jackie Joyner, May 11, 1985

As the greatest heptathlete of all time, you would expect that Jackie Joyner-Kersee would be a tremendous asset to a college team. She put together some huge efforts in dual meets; she once did all seven heptathlon events (for a 5671 score) plus a leg on the 4×100 all in less than three hours. Possibly her top collegiate effort was at the 1985 WCAA Championships (the California based women’s conference that predated women’s participation in the Pac-10).

There she won the 100 hurdles (13.31, beating a freshman teammate named Gail Devers), the 400 hurdles (55.87, then #7 on the all-time US list), the long jump (21′ 11″), the triple jump (42′ 6¾” in just her second TJ competition ever), took third in the high jump (6′ ½”), fourth in the javelin (151′ 5″), and sixth in the shot put (48′ 2″), and ran on the winning 4×100 relay team. All in all she accounted for 53½ points.

Xavier Carter, June 10, 2006

Carter was the first to even try a single-day NCAA Championships double in the 100 and 400 meters, and he managed to win them both. The 100 came first, where he ran from behind to upset defending champion Walter Dix and win in 10.09. Thirty-eight minutes later came the 400, where the “X-Man” was the clear favorite and once again he won it at the end, this time with an impressive 44.53. At the end of the meet he ran a third event, the 4×400, and the race was over when his LSU teammates gave him a lead at the final exchange. He ran a “comfortable” 45.5 leg and was never challenged. Add in the previous day’s 4×100 victory and he was the first since Owens to win four events at the NCAA Championships.

Eliminated in the heats…

John Woodruff, May 27, 1939

“Long” John Woodruff was an Olympic 800 meter champion while a college freshman, so he was already a world-class runner when he first used eligibility for the Pitt Panthers in 1937. He helped relay teams win doubles at Penn with regularity, running distances from 220 yards to 880 yards, and for three straight years he won a 440/880 double at the IC4A Championships. The last of those three, in 1939, was the most impressive; he tied the meet record in the quarter mile (47.0) and broke the meet record in the half mile (1:51.2).

Ronnie Delaney, June 14, 1958

Prior to 1958, the only man who successfully pulled off an NCAA mile/880 double was Michigan’s Ross Hume in 1945, when the war effort significantly depleted the level of competition. Delaney had competition. He had been the Olympic 1500 champion two years earlier, so he was already a known quantity. In both races he stayed well back of the leaders and then made a late and successful rush for the lead. His winning times were 4:03.5 (a meet record) and 1:48.6. Both were very respectable times for the late 50s, and even more so since he had just an hour’s rest between them.

James Lofton: April 29, 1978

Lofton put up possibly the biggest effort ever made in “The Big Meet”, as they call the annual Cal-Stanford clash. In 1978 he won the 100 (10.5 into a headwind), the 200 (20.5, still the meet record and the Stanford record), the long jump (25′ 7″ on just two jumps), and ran on both winning relays including a 45.9 carry on the 4×400. It was to no avail, as Cal won by a score of 86 to 68.

Clancy Edwards, April 29, 1978

Most of the athletes in this compilation went on to some level of greatness, but Edwards is one of the few who seemed to have peaked in collegiate competition. He was a holy terror in the USC-UCLA duals, which were some of the best (and certainly best-attended) meets of the 1970s. Before the 1978 meet he said “I’m not sure how I feel today. I don’t feel good, but I don’t feel bad.” He ran like he felt good and established two collegiate records. He anchored the 4×100 which won in a record 38.85, then won the 100 in 10.18, and topped it off with another collegiate record of 20.03 in the 200.

Carl Lewis, May 16, 1981

Lewis only used two years of collegiate eligibility at the University of Houston, but in that time he made a big impact on the record book, especially at the Southwest Conference championships meets. At the 1981 indoor championships in Fort Worth on February 20, he won the 60 yards in 6.06 (worth roughly 6.48 for 60 meters) and smashed the world indoor long jump record with 27′ 10¼” (8.49), which is still the #2 indoor mark in collegiate history.

At the outdoor championships in Dallas, he copped another “world record” with 10.00, the fastest ever at sea level. He also won the 200 (20.73), won the long jump with a single attempt (27′ ¾”), and ran a storming anchor in the 4×100 that brought his team up to second.

Meg Ritchie, May 7, 1983

Ritchie is without a doubt the best two-implement thrower in collegiate history. In the 1983 version of the annual Arizona-Arizona State-Northern Arizona triangular, she tied the collegiate shot put record on her first attempt (59′ 3″), broke it on her second (59′ 9″), and again on her third. The final result, 62′ 6¾” (18.99m), stood as the collegiate record for over 20 years. Her discus effort that day was only average by her standards, a 210′ 0″ throw (64.00m), but to date only four other collegians have ever thrown further.

Gail Devers, May 3, 1986

The UCLA vs USC dual meet rivalry is every bit as intense on the women’s side of the action as it is on the men’s side, and Devers almost won the 1986 edition all by herself. She won the 100 (11.41), 200 (23.38), 100 hurdles (13.30), and long jump (21′ 6¼”), took third in the triple jump (42′ 6¾”), and ran on both relays. The winner of the latter, the 4×400, determined the meet winner and Devers nearly won that one too. She anchored with 53.4, but it wasn’t enough to beat the Trojans, whose 3:32.58 was then the fastest ever recorded in a dual.

Joe Falcon, March 12, 1988

Distance runners like Falcon were big parts of the Arkansas machine that churned out twelve straight NCAA Indoor Championships from 1984 to 1995. Coach John McDonnell admitted that Falcon’s double “gave us the championship, the team title. That’s for sure.” Not much else went right for the Razorbacks—they were expecting big points in the 4×800 and 800 but came away with nothing—and Falcon accounted for 20 of their 34 points, but it was enough to win.

First came the mile, where Falcon ran a hard third quarter (57.7) on a tight 160 meter track to get clear of the field and win in a relatively comfortable 3:59.78. Sixty-five minutes later came the 3000, and Falcon hung back early before moving up late. Once he went to the lead it was over; McDonnell said “I knew there was no way he could lose at that point without breaking a leg. He had more speed than anyone else in the field.”

Vicki Huber, March 12, 1988

Villanova was a women’s distance powerhouse in the late 80s and early 90s, and Huber was one of the Wildcats’ biggest stars. The NCAA Indoor Championships are a meet with a condensed timeframe, so putting together a tough distance double was key to Villanova’s runner-up finish in 1988.

The mile came first, and Huber was expected to do battle with Wisconsin’s Suzy Favor, but a stiff leg after the 4×800 relay took her out of the race. Still, Huber ran a fast race, then the third-fastest in collegiate history (4:31.46) to win by 50 meters. An hour later she came back for another win in the 3000, leading for the entire last 800 meters.

Suzy Favor, March 10, 1990

Favor was a nine-time NCAA champion at Wisconsin, and on this day she won two of them. She was used to big workloads; “It’s not easy but it’s worth it,” she told the UPI’s Jim Slater. “You train for things like this. Big Tens was five races in two days so I should be ready. I’m anxious to be able to double and continue strong into the second race. I know I can get it done.” In the space of an hour she won the mile (4:38.19) and 3000 (9:02.30). Earlier that week she also got engaged to Mark Hamilton, a pitcher for the Wisconsin Badgers. Their relationship got a little weird in later years but appears to have survived.

Bernard Lagat, March 6, 1999

Lagat became just the third man to win a one-day NCAA indoor mile/3000 double (or its imperial equivalent, the 2-mile) and did it as you would expect him to have done it. He shadowed the leaders in the mile before zipping away with a 54-second final 400 for a 3:55.66 win. 85 minutes later he ran the same strategy in the 3000, finishing with a 56-second 400 for another win in 7:54.92.

Seneca Lassiter, April 24, 1999

Lassiter anchored three winning relays for his Arkansas Razorbacks at Penn, with two of them coming on the meet’s final day. His first win was a big one, anchoring the 4xmile relay with 3:55.6 and giving the Hogs the collegiate record to erase Oregon’s 37-year-old (!) standard. Three hours later he was back on the track to anchor the 4×800, where he got the baton clear of the field and his Razorbacks ran 7:13.87, the fastest time at Penn in fourteen years.

Seilala Sua, May 1, 1999

The head coach of the UCLA Bruins in the 1990s and 00s was throws guru Art Venegas, and his most complete pupil was Seilala Sua. Winning four events in the UCLA-USC dual meet is a rare accomplishment, but winning all four throwing events is unique. Sua did it in 1999 with marks of 17.05 (shot), 60.96 (discus), 58.38 (hammer), and 46.92 (javelin).

Nate Brannen & Nick Willis, April 30, 2005

Michigan dominated the distance events at the 2005 Penn Relays with a rare triple-win, and all three wins included Brannen and Willis. The double effort was on Saturday. The first was the 4xmile, where Willis ran third leg in 3:56.2 and Brannen anchored in 3:59.4 to set a new collegiate record of 16:04.54. Three hours later they came back for the 4×800 and again dominated the field, with Willis running third leg (1:48.6) and Brannen running anchor (1:49.8).

Galen Rupp, March 13, 2009

Rupp was the first to attempt a distance triple at the NCAA Indoor Championships, running in the 3000, 5000, and distance medley. The tough job was on Friday night, where he had to double in the longer race and then the relay. Lee Nichols for Track and Field News:

In an oddly tactical 5K that shifted be- tween dead sprints and almost complete stops, Rupp sat unrattled in 3rd most of the way before a decisive move with about three laps left gave him a 13:41.45 win, more than three seconds up on Liberty’s Sam Chelanga and Arkansas’s Shawn Forrest.

…

Two hours later he was back in the DMR, showing no fatigue as he blasted away from Hog miler Dorian Ulrey and Cal’s Michael Coe with 300 meters left for a 9:29.59 victory.

Lawi Lalang, March 9, 2013

Thanks to Let’s Run’s Jonathan Gault for reminding me of this one.
Before there was Edward Cheserek, there was Lawi Lalang. He was the first to try a one-day mile/3000 double since Lagat back in 1999, and he did it very well. David Monti for Race Results Weekly:

Lalang, the lanky junior from Kenya, set meet records in both the mile and the 3,000m in a span of one hour and 40 minutes…“So amazing, you know?” Lalang told reporters of running 3:54.74 in the mile followed by 7:45.94 in the 3,000m.

Today we’re talking to Chad Zallow, a sophomore hurdler at Youngstown State University. Heading into this weekend’s NCAA Indoor Championships, Zallow is the #2 seed in the men’s 60 meter hurdles. He is undefeated against collegiate competition in the 2016-17 season.

Squire: There is just one week left before the NCAA Indoor Championships. How are you feeling, and what are your goals for the meet?

Zallow: I’m feeling great going into this meet. Last year I actually came down with strep throat a couple days before I left for Nationals. But this year I’ve been healthy all year and my body has been feeling great (knock on wood). So it’s nice to finally be healthy again heading into this meet. My goals first and foremost is to make the finals and become a first team All-American. Last year I missed the finals by one spot. Once I’m in the finals i’m going for the title. I’m sure everyone else in that final is going to be aiming for the same thing and that’s the mindset you have to have if you want to win it.

Squire: There haven’t been many track athletes of your ability in the Horizon League. What were some of the factors in your choice of Youngstown State over other universities?

Zallow: I feel that in order to thrive academically and athletically it’s crucial to pick a place where you are going to be comfortable. Staying close to home at YSU [Zallow’s hometown is nearby Warren, OH] I had everything there I needed to be successful and then some. They have tremendous facilities with a brand new 300 meter indoor track and a brand new outdoor track. They had a coaching staff that I liked and being on same track team as my brother Carl close to home gives me a great support system which a lot of kids miss out on when they go away to school. The great thing about track and field is times speak for themselves. It doesn’t matter where you go to school; if you’re running the times you’re going to get attention.

Squire: As a graduate of the Mid-American Conference, I love that answer.
You’ve been doing this for a long time. How did you get involved in track and how did you end up in the hurdles?

Zallow: I’ve always had a lot of speed as a young kid and received a lot of attention for it actually back to my baseball days running around the bases. My dad got me and my brother starting running early with the Warren Striders Track Club when I was 6 or 7. Me and my brother were both sprinters but my dad wanted me to pick a different event so we can both thrive instead of competing against each other all the time. I picked up the hurdles around 6th grade and my form came naturally. Having speed and being a good athlete helped me adapt to the hurdles so easily and it paid off big time.

Squire: What part of your race is most important for success? In other words, what are you going to be concentrating on most this coming weekend?

Zallow: My start is the best part of my race. I feel like I have one of the best starts out there. I have hardly ever been beaten to the first hurdle in my life. Getting a great start is going to be crucial for Nationals. Once I get out of the blocks the biggest thing I’m focused on is coming off the last hurdle strong because I know this race is going to be won at the end. That’s something I been focusing on a lot over the past couple weeks.

Squire: Final question: Browns or Steelers?

Zallow: Browns all day! Been a big Browns fan since day 1!

The post Five Questions with Youngstown State Hurdler Chad Zallow appeared first on Daily Relay.

As always, our What2Watch page give you all the television and webcast listings.

What’s the top matchup of the weekend? It’s the headliner of a competition that boasts a staggering amount of talent.

Bedan Karoki vs Geoffrey Kamworwor

Men’s senior race, Kenyan National Cross Country Championships
Uhuru Gardens, Nairobi KEN
Saturday, time TBA
These are the world’s two best runners for anything longer than a track 10k and shorter than a marathon. Geoffrey Kamworwor is the reigning world champion for both half marathon and cross country, and Bedan Karoki was runner-up in both of those races. Karoki is in fine form but is coming off a short turnaround from winning the Ras Al Khaimah Half Marathon last Friday in a PR of 59:19. He had originally not planned to contest the national cross country championships but changed his mind a few days ago. This will be the season opener for Kamworwor, who recently revealed he suffered from pneumonia after the Olympics, then dislocated his left arm in an October auto accident. Kenya is the SEC of cross country, so names like Josphat Korir (2013 world cross country champion) and Augustine Choge (12:53.66 5k PR) are relegated to the background.

Since this is a competition run by Athletics Kenya, which makes the Trump administration look honest and organized by comparison, no competition timetable has been published nor do we know if any web coverage will be available. The various races of the day are likely to take place sometime between 8am and 1pm in Kenya, which is midnight to 5am in the Eastern time zone. The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation website has been suggested as a possible video provider.
EDIT: Justin Lagat has given us some help.

@LWarrenMaher @tracksuperfan I also have something like a timetable: 8Am junior women start.12pm, senior men start.

— Justin Lagat (@Kenyanathlete) February 17, 2017

The best of the rest, in chronological order…

Hoka New York-New Jersey Track Club vs record book

Men’s 4xmile relay, Artie O’Connor College Invitational
Armory Track & Field Center, New York NY
Friday, 7:45pm
Meet website | Live webcast via RunnerSpace Plus (subscription required)
Dyestat’s Doug Binder:

As the New Jersey-New York Track Club reconvened last fall and picked up a sponsorship deal with HOKA ONE ONE, a plan was hatched to go after the world record in the indoor 4xmile relay. And one of the people suggesting it was agent Ray Flynn, who just so happens to be part of the existing outdoor world record in that event from 1985 in Ireland. At the inaugural Artie O’Connor College Invitational at The Armory, the NJNY TC’s lineup of Donn Cabral, Ford Palmer, Kyle Merber and Colby Alexander will try to rip apart the indoor record of 16 minutes, 16.67 seconds set by the New York Athletic Club in 1993 and drive it under 16 minutes.

Under 16:00 would be quite an accomplishment. Either indoors or out, only two relay teams have ever done that, the above-mentioned Irish team that also included Eamonn Coghlan and Marcus O’Sullivan (15:49.08), and a 1983 New Zealand team anchored by John Walker. The outdoor American record is 16:03.24, set in 2009 by a University of Oregon crew that included Matt Centrowitz, Andrew Wheating, and Galen Rupp.

Jeff Henderson vs Fabrice LaPierre

Men’s Long Jump, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Barclaycard Arena, Birmingham ENG
Saturday, 1:32pm local time (8:32am ET)
Meet website | Webcast links
As of a few days ago my top matchup of the weekend was going to come from this meet. It was going to be 4-time Olympic champion Mo Farah against new Scottish star Andy Butchart, and based on the recent form of both athletes it looked like Butchart had a real chance at becoming the first Briton to beat Farah on the track since July of 2006. But Farah never faces decent competition in the UK; some of his margins of victory in British meets over the last three years have been 12.50, 15.56, 10.06, and 14.97 seconds. British track fan Ian Sharpes knows how it goes in Britain:

@Trackside2017 @pahunt1978 let someone in who could beat Mo? Expect AB to move to the mile last minute!

— Ian Sharpes (@IanTnf) February 14, 2017

Turns out he was wrong only in that Butchart has completely withdrawn from the meet. Farah has a much easier path to victory now.
The long jumpers are apparently not afraid of real competition. Jeff Henderson had a dream season last year, capped by an Olympic gold medal. He’s spent the indoor season running the 60 meters (and will in this meet) and this is his first jumping competition of the year. Australia Fabrice LaPierre won silver at the 2015 World Championships and took first three weeks ago at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston.

Hellen Obiri vs Sifan Hassan vs Shannon Rowbury

Women’s 3000 meters, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Saturday, 2:02pm local time (9:02am ET)
These three faced off at the first meet of the World Indoor Tour, the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, and Obiri came out on top. Between now and then, Obiri lost to Scotland’s Laura Muir, who is chasing records over 1000 meters later in the meet, and Hassan defeated Rowbury at the NYRR Millrose Games.

Bralon Taplin vs Pavel Maslak

Men’s 400 meters, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Saturday, 2:18pm local time (9:18am ET)
Taplin and Maslak are tied atop the World Indoor Tour standings in this event, so this is for all the marbles. Specifically, the tour winner gains a significant cash prize plus an automatic qualifier to next year’s World Indoor Championships. They’ve split their two meetings so far this season.

Robbie Grabarz vs Erik Kynard vs Donald Thomas

Men’s High Jump, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Saturday, 2:23pm local time (9:23am ET)
The Olympic appearances of Grabarz and Kynard have been oddly close. In 2012, Kynard came away with a surprise silver while Grabarz tied for bronze. Last year Grabarz was tied for fourth while Kynard was sixth, and both cleared the same height. Both have competed lightly this winter while Thomas already has the World Indoor Tour series title wrapped up.

Joanna Jóźwik vs Melissa Bishop

Women’s 800 meters, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Saturday, 2:29pm local time (9:29am ET)
Poland’s Jóźwik has three wins in three races on the World Indoor Tour, including a sub-2:00 clocking at the most recent one in Torun. Canada’s Bishop has opted for a more low-key season so far, with wins in North Carolina and Ireland, and while neither was as fast as Jóźwik’s best she wasn’t remotely pressed. The pair were fifth and fourth in the Olympic final last summer.

Ronnie Baker vs Kim Collins

Men’s 60 meter final, Müller Indoor Grand Prix Birmingham
Saturday, 4:00pm local time (11:00am ET)
How long has Kim Collins been doing this? He made his first Olympic team for his native St. Kitts and Nevis (in 1996) shortly after Microsoft released its first version of Internet Explorer (in 1995). This is his 50th career competition in the UK and he’s a crowd favorite virtually everywhere he runs. Baker, a two-time NCAA champion at this distance, raised eyebrows last week with a 6.46 clocking, which ties the fastest by an American in the last 14 years.

Brannon Kidder vs Shaquille Walker

The Soulpak Men’s 600m Run, Ocean Breeze Grand Prix
Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex, New York NY
Saturday, 8:20pm
Meet website | Live webcast via Flotrack (subscription required)
This is a new meet at Staten Island’s Ocean Breeze indoor track complex, a venue that is itself barely more than a year old. It targets the sub-elite post-collegiate athlete (the kind of meet the USA needs most) but Brannon Kidder and Shaquille Walker are nearly elite. Kidder won the 1000 at the Millrose Games last week. while Walker was near the tail end of that race. Cutting the distance down to 600 may give Walker the advantage. In terms of pure name power in this meet, Olympian Robby Andrews give the men’s mile the most prestige.

Quarter-miler vs half-miler vs miler

1200 meter pursuit, Grand Prix d’Athlétisme de Montréal
Complexe sportif Claude-Robillard, Montréal QC
Saturday, 9:30pm
Meet website | Live webcast
What, exactly, is the 1200 meter pursuit? According to our own Jim McDannald (who also happens to be Athletics Canada’s Communications Coordinator), leaders at the end of each lap win cash as follows:

Lap 1 – $50
Lap 2 – $100
Lap 3 – $150
Lap 4 – $350
Lap 5 – $600
Winner – $1,000
Sweep the race, win $2,250.

Thus an athlete can run hard for a few laps and win some money, then jog it in. The real question is how long the speedsters can last. The quarter-miler in question is four-time Olympic medalist Jeremy Wariner, the half-miler is U.S. Olympic Trials semifinalist Drew Windle, and the miler is Canadian Olympian Charles Philibert-Thiboutot. Adding to this circus is the presence of Lewis Kent, Canada’s former world record holder in the beer mile. The meet is an add-on to the Canadian Indoor Championships for youth and juniors. It includes “National” and “International” events, and the final few lanes for some of the international events will be filled with qualifiers from the national events.

Ryan Crouser vs Tom Walsh Mike Greer Homes Big Shot, The Big Shot and Fast K
Retro Sports Facility, Christchurch NZL
Sunday, 4:00pm local time (Saturday at 10pm ET)
Meet website
This mini-meet combines a 1000 meter road race and an elite shot put competition. Ryan Crouser and Tom Walsh are respectively the Olympic gold and bronze medalists. An outside threat to win is another Kiwi, Jacko Gill, who finished ninth in the Olympics and has already gone over 21 meters this winter.

The post The Weekend’s Best Matchups: Birmingham Indoor, Kenya Cross Country, and more appeared first on Daily Relay.

]]> http://dailyrelay.com/weekends-best-matchups-birmingham-indoor-kenya-cross-country/feed/ 1 http://dailyrelay.com/ahmed-runs-speaks-powerful-message/ http://dailyrelay.com/ahmed-runs-speaks-powerful-message/#respond Mon, 13 Feb 2017 14:00:00 +0000 http://dailyrelay.com/?p=9634 NEW YORK — Ben True won the thrilling Paavo Nurmi Two Miles against a loaded field on Saturday afternoon at the Millrose Games in northern Manhattan, but he took a moment afterward to show respect to the man who finished ... Read More

The post Ahmed runs and speaks with a powerful message appeared first on Daily Relay.

]]> NEW YORK — Ben True won the thrilling Paavo Nurmi Two Miles against a loaded field on Saturday afternoon at the Millrose Games in northern Manhattan, but he took a moment afterward to show respect to the man who finished three places and nearly two seconds behind him.

“That was a great thing you wrote, by the way,” True said, as he reached out to shake Mo Ahmed’s hand while Ahmed was being interviewed for this story.

Ahmed, though he didn’t realize it, had just set a new Canadian indoor two-mile record in the race, but his bigger statement, the one to which True was referring, came not with his legs on a track but with his fingers on a keyboard.

On Feb. 3, in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration, Ahmed published a column on CBC.com in which he described lifelong problems trying to cross the border from Canada to the United States, including a harrowing incident en route to a recruiting visit at the University of Washington.

Ahmed, a Canadian resident and citizen since his youth who ran for the country in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, was born in Mogadishu in Somalia, one of seven nations whose citizens were subject to a travel ban and “extreme vetting” under the president’s controversial late-January order.

Ahmed questioned whether the order would do anything “to improve security concerns” and warned about its potential negative impact on global terror.

“This ban has the potential to serve as a recruiting tool for extremists among young Americans who already feel disconnected and isolated from the rest of society,” he wrote. “Enacting a ‘Muslim ban’ seems counterintuitive. Aside from the destructive repercussions this executive order could have domestically, the ban hurts the very people who are most affected by extremism… those seeking refuge in America.”

Ahmed is known as Scoop by his Bowerman Track Club teammates because, as his BTC profile notes, “Mo concerns himself with always having choice information on topics.” His facility with information and the written word made him an obvious choice for the CBC’s David Giddens to reach out to for this column.

Ahmed wrote the piece while at altitude training in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he and Bowerman Track Club teammate Ryan Hill came directly from there to the Millrose Games, though perhaps not “directly.”

Ahmed and Hill arrived in Phoenix for their flight to New York, only to learn that flights to the region were canceled due to the snowstorm that struck the Northeast on Thursday. Ahmed and Hill made their way to Baltimore instead, where they stayed Thursday night before taking the train up to New York on Friday morning.

The trip gave Ahmed and Hill another opportunity to discuss world affairs, something Ahmed said is never far from their training-run conversation.

“My training partners, we have a lot of discussion about the Trump presidency,” said Ahmed after Saturday’s race. His Bowerman Track Club distance teammates include Hill, Rio steeplechase silver-medalist Evan Jager, Beijing 2008 Team USA flagbearer Lopez Lomong and 2012 Olympian Chris Derrick.

“We discuss global issues and stuff like that. We have a lot of time to kill, so on our run we talk for 70 minutes, 80 minutes. However long we’re running we talk about some things that come up on the news and talk about it and dissect it and grow and learn from each other.”

Ahmed’s travel partner Hill, the 2016 world 3000m indoor champion, led the two-mile race with 100 meters left, but True, who like Hill missed the 2016 Olympic team after making the 2015 Worlds team, kicked past him for the win.

After he congratulated Ahmed, True explained his opposition to the executive order.

“Our country is based on immigration, and the Statue of Liberty is right around the corner, and read the slogan at the base of it — that’s basically what our country is all about,” he said. “And to say, just because you’re from a certain nation that you’re somehow not welcome here, even though you’ve gone through all the legal precedents that require visas and require green cards, that’s very un-American.”

Though green-card holders were not specifically targeted by the ban and were eventually explicitly excluded from it after clarification, haphazard enforcement of the order led to many green-card holders being held in their countries of origin or kept in immigration limbo in airports across America on the first weekend after the ban was enacted.

“I feel sorry for people like Mo or like Hassan Mead, who are from countries that are on these lists and basically – Hassan Mead’s a citizen of the United States — and yet the President of this country is basically saying people like you are not welcome here. I think that’s a shame,” said True.

Mead, like Ahmed, is from Somalia. As a boy, he migrated to Djibouti and, with his mother and siblings, followed his father to Minnesota in 1999. He later ran for the University of Minnesota and made the 2016 Olympic team, also in the 5000m.

Mead told SI.com’s Chris Chavez on Friday, “Even if I may not be denied right now, it starts to stress you out. Airports are already a tension-filled environment with random selection because of your demographic and beliefs. Now there’s this order from someone with a lot of power, and I’m still trying to take it in as it’s happening.”

On a recent trip back from attending a friend’s wedding in Sweden, Ahmed experienced the “tension-filled” airport environment Mead described. Ahmed was held once again for extra screening, but then something unexpected happened.

“There was a [Customs and Border Patrol] lady who was talking to me, and, when she gave back my stuff, she’s just like, ‘I’m sorry, sir — it’s just bulls***,’ and I was like, ‘Thank you — thank you for saying that.’

“That was probably the first time that I actually encountered someone say sorry for the hassle,” said Ahmed, who grew up close to the US border in Ontario and later attended the University of Wisconsin. “I’ve been coming to the United States since ’14, ’15, and I’ve encountered a lot of times at borders, airports, missed flights. It’s something that I’ve had to deal with. It’s kind of nice that the lady said that to me.”

Ahmed is pleased by the public demonstrations that may have helped build momentum toward a stay of the travel ban that was upheld last week in a 3-0 vote of the 9th District Court of Appeals, though the Trump administration may appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court or issue a new executive order on immigration.

“It’s great that people are speaking up,” he said. “That’s what I expected. I was worried a bit, because, once [Trump] got elected, I was like, ‘How did that happen?’ But it’s good that there were a lot of protests.”

He’s also appreciated the support he’s gotten from athletes like True and even business leaders like Nike CEO Mark Parker, who, in a company-wide email sent in late January cited the “power of diversity” as one of many reasons why the executive order is “a policy we don’t support.”

“A lot of athletes definitely are against it, and it’s good to see that, and not just athletes — the greater portion of our society is against it honestly,” said Ahmed. “I love the [Nike] CEO, what he had to say. A lot of the Nike athletes are wearing black shirts that say ‘Equality.’ It’s good that a company I’m running for believes in that.”

Ahmed is running for redemption at this summer’s World Championships in London, site of his first Olympics appearance in 2012, Saturday’s race was another step in a journey back from disappointment after finishing one spot from the podium in fourth place in the 5000m in Rio.

With his performance Saturday, Ahmed now owns the Canadian record in the 3000m and two-mile indoors and 5000m outdoors. His 8:13.16 chopped more than a second and a half off Cam Levins’ previous Canadian best of 8:14.69.

The post Ahmed runs and speaks with a powerful message appeared first on Daily Relay.

]]> http://dailyrelay.com/ahmed-runs-speaks-powerful-message/feed/ 0 http://dailyrelay.com/monday-morning-run-weekend-full-records/ http://dailyrelay.com/monday-morning-run-weekend-full-records/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2017 11:00:31 +0000 http://dailyrelay.com/?p=9645 This is my second weekend of subbing for Kevin Sully for the Monday Morning Run and I’m still working on warming up to the format.

The Millrose Games dominated the domestic action and rightly so. There was a wide ... Read More

The post The Monday Morning Run: A Weekend Full of Records appeared first on Daily Relay.

]]> This is my second weekend of subbing for Kevin Sully for the Monday Morning Run and I’m still working on warming up to the format.

The Millrose Games dominated the domestic action and rightly so. There was a wide variety of competition and it was generally close and often ended in upset. Naturally, the New York Times is the place to get the story.

The meet got a good two hours of live coverage on NBC. I did not in fact get to see it yet since I spent sixteen hours over two days working at meets, but I’m told that the usual problems with the American broadcast model made themselves known basically right from the start. One of those problems is that all the attention prior and during a race is centered on the pre-ordained stars/favorites, which leaves the announcers flat-footed when the inevitable upsets happen. An example: yes, Tianna Bartoletta was, under normal circumstances, by far the best sprinter in the women’s 60 meters. But it was her season opener and Dezerea Bryant had already run several good races this winter, facts which significantly leveled the playing field. The audience was not made aware of this, but should have been.

I’ve also been told that USATF CEO Max Siegel was interviewed during the broadcast and made positive comments about broadcasts that include storytelling and making sure the stars are known. I do actually agree with him, but those things should not make up the entirety of the broadcast. One of the things people love about sports is that they are unscripted and upsets happen, and that should be a cause for celebration rather than an inconvenience.

On to the weekend’s medal winners.

Gold: Peres Jepchirchir

The reigning world half marathon champion toed the line at the Ras Al Kaimah Half Marathon on Friday morning (which is Thursday evening in the USA). The competition was top-notch: three-time New York City marathon winner Mary Keitany, London and Olympic marathon champion Jemima Sumgong, and three-time Olympic track champion Tirunesh Dibaba.

Jepchirchir suffered from pneumonia for two months late last year but it didn’t affect her performance here. Her 5k splits were 15:37, 15:27, 15:24, and 15:10 and then finished with 3:26 for the final 1.1k for a new world record of 1:05:06. That’s right, her second 10k was 30:34.

Keitany made it a race and finished just seven seconds in arrears and was closing near the end. She briefly led at 15k before Jepchirchir surged with the move that won the race and got the record.

Silver: US Women’s 800 meters

The American record, collegiate record, and US high school record in this event all fell on a single day.

On Saturday at 12:24pm in Clemson’s Tiger Paw Invitational, Texas A&M sophomore Jazmine Fray broke the collegiate record with 2:00.69. The previous record was held by Tennessee’s Nicole Cook, set back in 2005. It’s been a mercurial rise for Fray; her PRs have dropped from 2:09.07 (high school) to 2:07.05 (’16 indoor) to 2:03.25 (’16 outdoor) and now to 2:00.69. Never even a state champion in high school, now she is suddenly thrust into the status of co-favorite for the NCAA indoor title.

The other two records fell at 5:41pm in the Millrose Games. Ajee Wilson ran an evenly-paced race from the front and was rewarded with the American record, 1:58.27. The old record was 1:58.71, set by Nicole Teter in 2002. It’s not just a world-leading time for Wilson but the world’s fastest non-Russian indoor time since 2004.

Three and half seconds later, Samantha Watson of Henrietta, New York, crossed the line in 2:01.78 and erased the oldest indoor record on the books: Mary Decker’s 2:01.8, set back in 1974. Watson is no newcomer to success – she is a gold medalist at both the World Youth and World Junior Championships – and the fact that Watson wasn’t even shooting for the national record tells you how good it was. Decker was just 15 when she ran what was then the world indoor record at the San Diego Indoor Games.

Bronze: Hannah Cunliffe

The Oregon sprint star won the 60 meters at the Don Kirby Invitational in a time of 7.07, which breaks the collegiate record. The NCAA long ago stopped keeping a record book, but both the USTFCCCA and Track and Field News keep their own sets of records. Both will amend an “A” next to the record since it was set in the high altitude of Albuquerque, which is kind of like the asterisk next to Roger Maris’ home run record.

In any case, it indicates that Cunliffe is completely over the season-ending injury that cut her down at the NCAA outdoor championships last June, and her Oregon Ducks are in a good position for winning yet another national indoor championship.

Surging: Clemson’s new track

In addition to Fray’s new collegiate record, the Tiger Paw Invitational at Clemson produced another outstanding mark: Texas A&M’s Fred Kerley ran 45.02 in the 400 meters, the #6 indoor time ever run, collegiate or otherwise. Christian Coleman (Tennessee) put up a collegiate leader in the men’s 200 (20.46) and Shakima Wimbley (Miami) did the same in the women’s 400 (51.28). Clemson’s brand-new banked track is apparently the new title-holder for the fastest indoor oval in America.

Slowing: International relations

President Trump may not be the only person who doesn’t know if his administration will have a detrimental effect on Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Olympics. IOC members live on a plane of existence quite different from, well, anyone else, and anyone who says they know what drives their voting (aside from financial incentives) is fooling themselves.

On a much smaller level, though, there are problems developing. University of Sherbrooke runner Yassine Aber, a sophomore born and raised in Canada, was denied entry to the US last Thursday when his team was traveling to a meet in Boston. He has passed through the border on many occasions in the past with no problem, and the rest of his team was allowed to cross. Canadian Running magazine has the story.

Canadian university teams compete in US track meets with a great degree of regularity, and the movement goes both ways. For example, the University of Detroit’s team practices at the University of Windsor’s indoor facility twice a week. Despite the stereotype of a mostly-white heterogeneous society, a greater portion of Canadians (20%) than Americans (13%) are foreign-born. On the other hand, this particular problem was centered around a young man who has never resided anywhere but the Great White North.

Take the above and now imagine the more than three thousand runners in the Detroit Free Press Marathon who cross over into Windsor and back again during the race and what kind of headaches might be in store this October for race organizers and participants.

Surging: Ronnie Baker

Lost in all the attention on domestic action was a pair of quality European meets. One was the Copernicus Cup in Poland, the fourth stop on the IAAF’s World Indoor Tour, where Ronnie Baker made an impression when he won the 60 meters in 6.46. No American has run faster* since Justin Gatlin’s 6.45 at the 2003 USATF Indoor Championships. It ties him for #12 on the all-time world list.
(*that is, if you ignore Trell Kimmons’ 6.45 at Albuquerque’s mile-high altitude, which you probably should since the altitude is worth about 0.02 over that distance.)

Does this mean that the US has a new prospect? Maybe. Or, maybe, it could mean that most top American post-collegiate sprinters have skipped the indoor season for the last 14 years. Or it could mean he’ll be another of the long line of athletes who were just a lot better at the 60 than at the 100. In any case, this is the man to bet on at the USATF Indoor Championships; he won the last two NCAA 60 meter titles, so you know he can run when it matters.

The post The Monday Morning Run: A Weekend Full of Records appeared first on Daily Relay.

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