For the first time in Oregon track and field history, there was an etiquette lesson on the championship podium Sunday.
Ladies first.
The Oregon women took a seven-point first-day lead and turned it into a runaway win Sunday, clinching their first team title since 1992 with two events remaining and scoring a team-record 165.5 points.
“We didn’t want to get too excited because we knew things were going well but we kept getting further ahead on our form charts and it reached a point where it’s like, I think maybe we can pull Alex (Kosinski) from the 5,000 (meters),” associate head coach Dan Steele said. “It was terrific.”
Three-time defending champions Arizona State and perennial power Stanford wilted behind the Ducks as they picked up surprise wins in the 400m, pole vault, triple jump and scored unexpectedly high in the 4×100 relay, 5,000m and 1,500m.
Stanford finished in second with 138 points, Arizona State came in third with 112 and USC was fourth with 108.
This from the program that was dead last in 2000 at the conference meet and seventh as recently as 2007.
After a first day that saw Rachel Yurkovich become the fifth woman in Pac-10 history to win four event titles with a conference-record throw of 191 feet, 2 inches, the women picked up where they left off.
The women started it with a third-place finish in the 4x100m relay in 44.80 seconds, even holding a lead on the anchor leg with 60 meters to go. Then, in the 1,500m, an event Stanford expected to gain ground on the Ducks in with top runners Lauren Centrowitz and Alicia Follmar, Alex Kosinski and Nicole Blood took third and fourth, scoring 11 points for Oregon and only giving two points back to the Cardinal.
Emboldened by the race, the Ducks began a string of performances that Steele said he couldn’t imagine in his wildest dreams.
Keshia Baker won her second consecutive Pac-10 400m title by improving by more than a second, running 51.74 seconds, the second-best outdoor time in UO history, despite being an afterthought to UCLA’s Nicole Leach.
“Having the team title means the most to me right now,” Baker said afterward.
“Keshia’s 400 really got me juiced up,” said Jamesha Youngblood, who set Oregon records in the long and triple jump over the weekend, winning both. “I knew that if I could get a good jump out there at the beginning maybe I’ll intimidate some of the girls and they’ll fall off.”
That seemed to be the game plan for the Oregon women all day. They continued to gain momentum with Zoe Buckman’s win in the 800m in 2:05.39 and Alex Kosinski’s fifth-place finish.
By the time Nicole Blood barely lost in the 5,000m after a surging Lauren Centrowitz of Stanford eclipsed her in the final 50 meters – after Blood herself came from behind to take the lead from Stanford’s Laurynne Chetelat only 100 meters earlier – the Ducks had another win from across the field in the pole vault, and were just about to get a surprise eight points from Lucy Cridland’s second in the discus, moving into eighth all-time at UO with a mark of 170-4.
“Everybody’s been saying we’re so young,” Blood said. “We’re trying to show we can be the top in the nation.”
In the pole vault, Melissa Gergel set three personal records en route to jumping 14 feet, 2 inches, beating Katie Morgan in a duel in the sun-soaked infield of Hayward. The mark is six inches shy of the Oregon school record, and left Gergel jumping in the media tent when she found out the women had clinched the meet.
“We tasted it a little bit last year when we scored 100 points, and we thought we could totally do this next year,” said Gergel, who was happy to contribute 10 (first place) points to the win. “Eight points would be good but 10 is better.”
Was there any better mindset for the Oregon women Sunday?
Tired of watching their male counterparts take victory laps the past two years, the Oregon women were the first to sprint out onto the track after the finish of the 4x400m relay, reveling in the program’s first Pac-10 win in nearly the lifetime of some of the athletes. After each team took customary photos on the award stand, the two teams combined for a raucous photoshoot as many of the 7,386 in attendance stayed for the celebration.
“This was as close to a perfect day of track and field as you’re going to get,” Steele said.
At least, it’s the best since 1992.
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