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BELGRADE, SERBIA – MARCH 4: An overview of the starting blocks on the second day of the 2017 Indoor Athletics European Championships at the Kombank Arena on March 4, 2017 at Belgrade, Serbia. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images)
In recent years, many good things have happened around BYU sports, but BYU Track and Field, taking the 1st, 3rd and 4th places in the men's 10km race, could be the best.
Listen to me. Football is nice and basketball is the prince, we all know it. All other sports are only peasants in the sense of BYU's sporting realm.
But what happened on Wednesday night for the BYU track is nothing short of spectacular, and I can not think of anything of recent history that matches the domination and performance that took place in the stadium almost empty of the NCAA Outdoor Athletics Championships in Austin, Texas.
Clayton Young won the individual championship in 29: 16.60 and his teammates Connor McMillian (29: 19.85) and Connor Mantz (29: 19.93) took third and fourth overall.
Any real runner knows that there are two track kings in the current events, the 100 and the 10,000 meters. All the other races, even if they are still excellent and deserving, are not as good as those two. If a rider is in the 5,000 meters or 1,500 meters, it is because he does not have the stamina to stay with the elite riders of the 10,000 meters. If a runner is in the 400, he misses the speed to run in the 100 meters.
Again, it's not a shock against other events, I was a 800/1500 meter runner myself, but the real endurance and speed races are the 10,000 and 100 meter races .
Other dominant performances
Looking at other recent dominant performances, we have
- Football wins in Wisconsin
- Men's Basketball Wins Gonzaga Title, Ranked # 1
- Women's volleyball team qualifies for final four
- Women's basketball team in the round of 16
- Softball wins WCC title a billion times in a row
- Peter Kuest wins golf tournaments at an unreal rhythm
- Men's Cross Country Team Wins Second Place in NCAA Finals
All these performances are excellent, but with the possible exception of the men's cross-country team, none of them have been on the biggest stage, or at least managed to reach the biggest stage with that kind of success.
The problem is that, unlike most team sports, the race is individual. So take a position in football and imagine that three of the four of them lead the nation, regardless of its position. It does not happen!
Think of all 347 Division 1 teams, take six distance runners who run 10,000 meters each, and BYU has the 1st, 3rd and 4th best runners of each. Not to mention three other BYU riders qualified for the race, finishing 15th, 21st and 25th.
The team scored 21 points in the singles event, which would have earned it the tenth place overall. If BYU can find a way to score a dozen more points, it may be that they find themselves in the top five finalists, which many riders still waiting to argue are not out of the question.
After the second day of competition, the Cougars are second in the overall NCAA championship standings.
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