Superfan Daily: Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

In advance of Saturday's New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston, this week I give you a 1961 article on Bruce Kidd's coming out party at the Massachusetts Knights of Columbus meet.

Until 10:30 p.m. last Saturday night the Massachusetts Knights of Columbus indoor track meet at Boston Garden had been nothing more than the routine opening of the eastern indoor season. Then, suddenly, a 17-year-old Toronto high school senior named Bruce Kidd put on a display in the two-mile run that brought the spectators out of their seats screaming. The indoor season discovered its first real hero when Kidd won the 22-lap race in the remarkable time of 8:49.2. Never in track history, indoors or out, has anyone so young run so far so fast. He reached the finish line five yards ahead of Peter McArdle, a balding, 31-year-old Irishman from New York, and 35 yards ahead of Fred Norris, the cadaverous looking 39-year-old Englishman who is now a freshman at McNeese State in Louisiana.

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Yesterday's Results Indoor Classic Vienna
Dusika Stadion, Vienna AUT
Results


What's On
The Moscow High Jumps Cup takes place today in the Russian capitol.  The biggest name competing is Russia's Ivan Ukhov, who jumped 2.38m in his season opener and twice barely missed at the world record height of 2.44m.

There will be a Springermeeting today in the German city of Dessau.  The events on tap are the men's pole vault and women's high jump.  Top entrants are Malte Mohr, Bjorn Otto, Alexander Straub and Fabian Schulze for the men, and Antonietta Di Martin and Ruth Beitia for the women.
Preview and information (in German)

The second meet in the BIGBANK Estonian Winter Grand Prix takes place today in Tallinn.

The Gugl Indoor Meeting takes place today in the Austrian city of Linz.


Track on TV
Bud Greenspan Presents: Beijing 2008 - America's Olympic Glory, 2:50 PM and 11:00 PM on Showtime Family Zone

News Links
Runner's World's Racing News has all the headlines.

Today is National Signing Day for high school tracksters.

Ken Goe's daily Oregon track news.

Flotrack's Tasty Race of the Week


and Kick of the Week


The new USTFCCCA rankings are out, and Florida and Oregon are the top men's and women's teams.

Let's Run's look back at the week in running.

Universal Sports' Joe Battaglia catches up with Fabiana Murer.

Sudanese 800 star Abubaker Kaki got stuck in Egypt's uproar and finally had a chance to flee.

A Track and Field News Q and A with Leo Manzano, and they have video of Ryan Crouser's two shot put records from the weekend.

David Oliver says Bolt's thunder will be stolen at the Daegu World Championships.

It's been suggested that the IPC (Paralympic) Athletics World Championships could be held in the two weeks following the IAAF Worlds, as is done with the Olympics/Paralympics.

Martin Bingisser has found another competition: Germany's Christmas tree throwing contest.

Dallas is seriously looking at bidding for the 2020 Summer Olympics.

The 2012 Olympic Trials website is now online.

Interesting: Matt Tegenkamp is running the USA Cross Country Championships this weekend.

The third installment of The Guardian's gonzo reporting on Kenyan running.

Superfan Daily: Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

Today we have a Sports Illustrated article from 1965 profiling the start of the track season.

Two months ago the prospects for a successful indoor track season seemed about as rosy as winter slush. The combination of post-Olympic ennui and post-truce hostilities between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Amateur Athletic Union made promoters wonder where they would get enough athletes to fill their programs or enough ticket buyers to fill their seats.


They need not have worried. What threatened to be one of track's dullest winters in years shows every sign of being its brightest and most exciting. Last week in San Francisco a crowd of 11,412 showed up at the Cow Palace for the first indoor meet of the season. No legitimate indoor records were jeopardized, but as a preview of things to come the meet was a rousing success.


First of all, it was revealed that there will be girls, lots of them. There will be plenty of visitors from abroad, too, the largest and most exotic group the indoor season has ever enjoyed. There will be imaginative new events that would have tickled P. T. Barnum. And finally, to assuage fears of the serious indoor track enthusiast that more cake than bread will be available, there will be lots of plain, nourishing competition.

Track on TV
Endurance, 6:00 AM tomorrow onFLiX
Running , 9:30 AM tomorrow on Showtime Family Zone
Prefontaine, 9:30 AM tomorrow on Showtime Showcase

News Links
Runner's World's Racing News has all the headlines: Millrose adds Galen Rupp and a 2-mile race, the Boston Indoor Games have a new title sponsor, and more.

Lolo Jones wins Mr. Universe's Tweet of the Week award.

Part 2 of iRunnerblog's interview with Shalane Flanagan.

Galen Rupp's 2011 season will have distinct and separate indoor and outdoor portions.

Olympic News: the USOC and IOC are opening discussions on a new revenue-sharing agreement, and GM paid big to be the lone auto advertiser for NBC's 2012 Olympic coverage.

TFN's Garry Hill says loud music and other histrionics get in the way of experiencing a track meet.  Agreed.  I've also noticed that a road race or triathlon that has a DJ is almost invariably poorly organized.

College news: Pre-season D-II rankings released, and Florida's super-sprinter/footballer Jeff Demps will miss the season opener (and maybe more).

Anti-doping news: The two Greek sprinters are finally in court for their 2004 Olympic antics, a key suspect in Operation Galgo has been found dead, an editorial explains how dope cheaters who pass tests are still found, and a researcher will probe into Kenyan running.

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

To go with this week's Runner's World retrospective on the 2000 Foot Locker Cross Country, I give you this 2001 article about Alan Webb and Dathan Ritzenhein by Tim Layden.

Two high school runners. One is a pure miler named Alan Webb, a muscular senior from Reston, Va. He's strong and fast, with an insatiable appetite for swift training and a gift for stretching his speed over the four laps of his chosen race. The other is a pale waif named Dathan Ritzenhein, a willowy senior from Rockford, Mich. He has an elfin build and a fearsome ability to run for miles at the edge of collapse. The year is 2001, and these two young runners are linked across generations to Ryun and Lindgren. "They are," says 30-year-old Bob Kennedy, the U.S.-record holder for 5,000 meters, "the best two high school runners to come along together in a long time."

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

Tomorrow will be the 101st running of Cincinnati's Thanksgiving Day Race, the oldest of the hundreds of similar races held across the country.  In honor of that is a rememberance of Cincinnati's Ted Corbitt, one of the running communities' most important men who was nearly as old as tomorrow's 10k.

St. Stephen’s Methodist Church, the old wooden structure where friends and family came to say goodbye to Ted Corbitt, is a little jewel, more than 100 years old. The small, round sanctuary with the oak pews softened from years of loyal church worshippers formed a crescent with Ted, resting in his treasured New York Pioneer Club sweatshirt, as its centerpiece. Around his neck was a finisher’s medal from the 2007 New York City Marathon that his son, Gary, had run and dedicated to his dad. It was a personal gesture, very fitting to the aura of the occasion, as it was the family side of Ted Corbitt that was remembered at his wake and funeral, attended by friends who went back 40 years and had plenty of Ted stories to tell. Honored guests at the funeral eulogized Ted not as the legendary father of long-distance running but as the family man and friend with the gentle spirit. As is often the case at wakes and funerals, the occasion brought laughter and humor as well as tears and sadness. Gary Corbitt recalled later, “I never saw so many grown men with tears in their eyes.”

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

It's been a little while since I've done one of these.  Today's pick is in honor of cross country season, a 1979 profile of the oldest annual cross country race in the USA.

The Northfield Mount Hermon School is situated on the banks of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts, deep in the heart of New England prep country. Its athletic rivalry with Deerfield Academy, a few miles to the south, is well known, at least in preppie circles, and Deerfield Weekend is the high, or low, point of Mount Hermon's football season, depending on its outcome.


For the last 88 years Mount Hermon has also been running, but its premier event, the annual Bemis-Forslund Pie Race, has been a rather well-kept secret. That's a shame, because there is nothing quite like it. For one thing, it is the oldest footrace in the U.S., six years older than the Boston Marathon and, by those who know it, more highly regarded. Students, faculty, staff, alumni and occasionally a guest or two are invited each year to the rural Mount Hermon campus to run a 4.5-mile cross-country course on the Monday of Thanksgiving week. The first three boy students, the first three girl students and the first alumnus and alumna to finish receive medals. Everyone else who beats a specified time—33 minutes for males, 40 minutes for females—gets a pie, a 10-inch, two-crust, all-American apple pie made that morning in the school bakery.

1979 was special for this otherwise mostly unknown race. Mount Hermon's most famous alumni, Frank Shorter, came back to try to break the course record in the twilight of his career.

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

Fifty years ago today, Herb Elliott and Dyrol Burleson were on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Now a new and different Elliott is on tour, a brief trip this time, to California, where he has a schedule of three races at 1,500 meters and a mile. Only one of these is very important: the mile he will run this week at the Modesto Relays against a field that includes Dyrol Burleson (see cover), the youngster from the University of Oregon who is the best miler America has ever produced.

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

With the Oregon Twilight meet coming up this weekend, here's a 1975 SI article on Eugene and its love affair with track and running.

No matter what they tell you, Oregon has days of sunshine. The temperature will rise into the high 90s and the Willamette River will fill with black inner tubes and thrashing, splashing humans. And then Eugene's runners-joggers (maybe 10,000 of us out of a population of 90,000) take their exercise early in the morning or in the long twilight.

Your Track Vault Pick of the Week

With the Jamaica International coming up on Saturday, this week you get a classic Kenny Moore writeup on the 1977 version of the meet.

But for a pair of notable absences, the meet was first-rate. The most worrisome of the nonappearances was that of the 1972 Olympic intermediate-hurdles gold medal winner, John Akii-Bua of Uganda, whose presence would have reassured the world that he has not been swept away in Idi Amin's purge of Akii-Bua's Lango tribe. Ominously, Akii-Bua sent no word at all.