The moment Melissa Gergel cleared 14 feet, 2 inches in the pole vault Sunday – keep in mind it was her third personal best of the event that day – the celebration began.
For more than 14 feet, she fell with a smile. As soon as she hit the mat, she was up again, instantly, flexing her arms and letting out a scream. She came up so quick that she fell down in the back of the mat again.
Yeah, it was that kind of afternoon for the Oregon track and field program.
Nothing to take away from the men’s win, their third in a row and fourth in five years, but that was expected.
Gergel’s win wasn’t. Jamesha Youngblood’s dual wins and school records in the long and triple jumps weren’t. Keshia Baker’s 400m win wasn’t. Their 4x100m team taking third, with its second leg running with a broken toe and its anchor a jumper by nature, well, that definitely wasn’t.
And so it went. One by one, the victorious women Ducks were brought to the media tent throughout the weekend. They won seven of the meet’s 21 events, the most in school history. They survived the first day ahead of Stanford by seven points, held off the Cardinal again in the first major test of the day, the 1,500m, and, at least it appeared this way from my angle, looked around and thought, ‘Why can’t we win this?’
No one really had an answer for that one. So they went ahead and won, in big-time style.
“The guys have been overlooking us for so long, so we wanted to stand out as a women’s team.” Youngblood said.
People will look at the win from around the country and shrug. It’s Oregon; so what? Isn’t it a track factory?
In recent memory, not the women. Signing national high school javelin record holder Rachel Yurkovich, from Newberg, Ore., in 2005 was nearly a coup considering how poor the women’s team was. And the performance of Rebekah Noble her freshman year, winning nationals as a freshman, spurred the signings of others, like Nicole Blood and Alex Kosinski. And slowly it went.
But a few signings didn’t just get the Ducks where they were Saturday. Something otherwordly looked like it took hold of their athletes.
As they came off the track, everyone stood, smiling. Nicole Blood, who had taken the lead in the 5,000m with 150 meters to go before being passed with 50m left and costing her a chance to defend her title, couldn’t stop smiling. Hey Nicole, you know you just got beat, right?
“The last (kilometer) was really hard but it felt good to work through something like that and I know it’ll benefit me for nationals,” she said. And that was one of the last things she talked about that wasn’t about her team. Same with Baker, who eagerly watched her team sprint out onto the track for its victory lap as she was held for a minute of questions.
“Can I,” an eye cocked toward the team, not quite letting ‘go’ get out. And so, for the woman whose win in the 400m, who ran a shocking 1.5 second personal best to win the event for the second straight year, concessions were made after only one minute of questioning.
She sprinted out to meet her teammates. Nobody clocked her time over the 50-odd meters but it looked pretty fast, considering she’d run two 400m races, plus a 100m relay leg that day already.
When the team got its hands on the Pac-10 title trophy on the infield, Baker was one of the first to grab it.
“Pass it around!” she said.
Everyone on the team seemingly played a role in the win, so it seems only right that everyone got a handle on it.
That was after the fact, though. Forty-five minutes earlier, when Gergel was walking on air into the media tent after her win, she said how felt it great to contribute 10 points to her team.
“I knew it was going to be a battle right to the end,” she said.
Well, not quite, Melissa. After the interview paused to let the roar of the crowd from the men’s 5,000m finish subside, a reporter next to me let her know the women had just mathematically clinched the team’s win with two events still to go.
Her eyes went huge, and she screamed again, and laughed a lot.
“We DID?” she gasped.
She didn’t see it coming. No one did, not like this.
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Women surprise with win
Daily Emerald
May 18, 2009
Mike Perrault
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