This Oregon men’s track and field team was a giant once. That giant went to sleep for a while.
But the alarm clock is ringing now.
In the past two seasons, the Ducks have proved their individual talent by placing ninth at the NCAA Championships in 2001, then proved their team togetherness by finishing second at this season’s Pacific-10 Conference Championships.
Put those two together, head coach Martin Smith said, and you’ve got a recipe for track and field dominance.
“I certainly think we have the excitement about taking another step forward, not only at the conference level,” Smith said. “With our performance of two years ago at the nationals, (we’re excited about) a high competitive level at the national meet.”
The awakening began at that national meet in 2001, where the Ducks got national championships from John Stiegeler in the javelin and Santiago Lorenzo in the decathlon. Fueled by the 20 points from those two athletes, Oregon shocked the field and finished in the top 10.
This season, Stiegeler and Lorenzo both went down with injuries, the former with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in April and the latter with a quadricep injury in the winter. Forced with the prospect of a postseason without the team’s key athletes, the rest of the Ducks banded together with a Pac-10 title as their rallying cry.
“Basketball has done it, football has done it,” senior runner Simon Kimata said of a Pac-10 championship back in April. “I’m not talking about individual, I’m talking about the team. It would make a lot of sense if we got it.”
The words of the athletes resounded through the year. The athletes talked of building toward Pac-10s, not NCAAs. They spoke of stepping up in Pullman, Wash., the site of the conference meet. They spoke of competing up to and beyond their potential.

Then, in mid-May, they went to Pullman and did all those things. The Ducks fell 26 points short of the Pac-10 title, but their second-place finish was progress enough from their fifth-place finish the season before. At the meet, the Ducks won five individual Pac-10 titles, and only one came from an athlete who was ranked first in his event heading in.
“I thought (the Pac-10 meet) was an extremely rewarding and very satisfying performance by our young men,” Smith said. “I was very proud of them and very happy for them.”
The NCAAs turned out to be a different story. Only Jason Hartmann, fourth in the 10,000-meter race, and Micah Harris, seventh in the 110 hurdles, scored points in Baton Rouge, La. The Ducks dropped 26 spots from the previous year to finish 35th overall.
But Smith is hoping that next year will bring success in the conference and national meets.
“Obviously we’re going to put John (Stiegeler) back into the equation in the javelin and Santiago Lorenzo in the decathlon,” Smith said. “Then you add some good recruits, and the development of the athletes that are returning, we’re obviously very excited about the journey of next year.”
With Stiegeler and Lorenzo coming back in 2003, next year’s Duck squad won’t lack for talent. Three of the five Oregon Pac-10 champions will be back. Two of the four Ducks who finished second at the Pac-10 meet will be back. Smith’s recruiting class is perhaps the best since his class of 2001, which was ranked No. 1 nationally by Track and Field News.
With the addition of those recruits and the maturation of young stars like sophomore-to-be Eric Logsdon — who ran the fastest 5,000 time for an Oregon freshman since 1981, and did it with only one shoe — and junior-to-be Nick Bakke, who came out of nowhere to win the Pac-10 javelin title, the Ducks’ youth movement is obviously under way.
“To be successful in the Pac-10, it’s going to require (championship) type of efforts not only by those young men but also by other young men,” Smith said.
Those young men will replace the old men who leave the team this year. Among the graduating seniors are Harris, Kimata, Pac-10 decathlon champion Billy Pappas, Pac-10 high-jump champion Kyley Johnson and former Pac-10 high-jump champion Jason Boness.
Harris is the only one of those athletes who will extend his season, to the USA Championships in Palo Alto, Calif., later this month. Hartmann may join him on the Stanford track; the sophomore distance runner is currently a “B” qualifier.
For Smith and the rest of the Ducks, 2001 and 2002 were just the initial yawns of a sleeping giant. The wake up call, they hope, will come in 2003.