Unpacking Friday’s Top Feats, Starting With Will Sumner’s 800 And Turner Washington’s Last Word In Discus
By David Woods for DyeStat
Bert Richardson photo
AUSTIN, Texas – Here is a list of top performances from the Friday night men’s windup of the NCAA Championships. (Plus honorable mention.)
It is a subjective list. Yours will be different. That is one of the admirable features of track and field: passionate fans holding strong opinions.
1, Will Sumner runs stunning second lap to win 800 meters.
No matter how impressed you were by Georgia freshman Will Sumner, what he did was more impressive than you imagined. In clocking a facility record of 1:44.26, he negative split with laps of 53.12/51.14.
Sumner climbed to No. 5 on the all-time collegiate list, met the World Championships standard of 1:44.70 and ran the fastest 800 by an American this year. He ranks No. 8 in the world behind seven men who ran in the 1:43s Friday at Paris.
At 19, Sumner could be headed to August’s World Championships at Budapest.
When he bolted ahead with a half-lap left, the move looked potentially foolish. Instead, he kept separating from NCAA indoor champion Yusuf Bizimana, who ran a PB of 1:45.74 for second place and was still left in the Texas dust.
“I didn’t really expect anyone to take it, so that’s why I wanted to go position myself in the front,” Sumner said. “I could have done a little more to make it a little more honest, but I just wanted to be as relaxed as I could be, and 53 ended up being the number, I guess.”
I tried to locate runners whose second laps were as fast as 51 seconds. Know who I found? Herb Elliott, Jim Ryun, Steve Ovett, David Rudisha.
At the 1958 Empire Games at Cardiff, Wales, after a dawdling 58.8 first lap, Elliott built a lead and held off Brian Hewson, 1:49.3 to 1:49.5, for 880 yards. (Subtract 0.6 for 800 meters.) Elliott ran the second lap in 50.5 and Hewson in 49.9.
That was no 1:44 race. This was:
On June 10, 1966, at Terre Haute, Ind. – nearly 57 years ago to the day – a 19-year-old Ryun set an 880-yard world record of 1:44.9 off laps of 53.3/51.6. (That’s equivalent to 1:44.3, or the same as Sumner.)
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Ovett won the gold medal in 1:45.4 off 54.9/50.5.
At Kenya’s 2012 Olympic Trials in Nairobi, Rudisha was credited with 52/50 in running 1:42.12.
Sumner, of Canton, Ga., came out of high school with 45.78/1:46.53 credentials. He said he would weigh options about turning…
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