Division III Championships Day One Recap: Distance

UPDATE: The 4800 meter results are the official results, with Cheadle as the winner and no times awarded. Stevens’s protest today was heard and denied.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – The race started at 5:25. About fifteeen minutes and fifteen seconds later–a time which, to be fair, any one of hundreds of observers could have noticed was way too fast for a women’s 5k at DIII nationals–the lap counter rang the bell, and all hell broke loose. Two hours after that, at 7:37, results were posted with Amy Regan as the 5k national champion; two hours after that, after lengthy discussions and phone calls to faraway rulebook authorities, it was decided that the final results would be passed down at noon today. All because a bell was rung 35 seconds too early and a group of adults struggled to count backwards from 25.

Regan (of Stevens Institute) and WashU’s Lucy Cheadle broke away from the field and were clearly feeling each other out in the last kilometer. Cheadle made a decisive move with what I am pretty sure was 500 meters to go–and what she likely thought was 300 meters to go–and came down the homestretch to a red "1" on the lap counter and a bell ringing that was audible from fifty meters away.

She easily won the 4800 meter race at nationals, but then her coach Jeff Stiles ran onto the track and reminded everyone that it was a 5k. Both Cheadle and Regan had come to a complete stop, but Regan had significantly more energy left, and won the 5000 meter race at nationals. The next three women–Cornell’s Abrah Masterson and Johns Hopkins’s Fran Loeb and Sophia Meehan–were seemingly the only other ones whose outcome was heavily swung by the snafu. All three of them were very close together through 24 laps.

Loeb went to the ground at 4800 meters, meaning if the 24 lap results are used, she’ll end up somewhere between third and fifth, but if the 25 lap results are used, she’ll register a DNF. Masterson was third and Meehan fourth in the initial 25 lap results posted.

There are no series of words and punctuation marks that could make this better. Either Cheadle or Regan will be righteously angry in a few hours–both have a legitimate claim to the national title. Cheadle was just doing what she was told by the officials, and looked utterly dominant until the disaster. Regan was indisputably the first woman to finish five thousand meters. And now one of them won’t be a national champion.

This isn’t a tragedy. This is three–Cheadle, Regan, Loeb–highly educated women who are going to graduate from excellent institutions with excellent jobs in science, or education, or finance, or whatever they want. This presumably isn’t their final national meet, with outdoors coming up in two months. This is an important race that got bungled by the officials.

And it did get bungled by the officials. Empathy and accountability can co-exist; you can feel terrible for someone while also acknowledging that something is their fault. The officials messed this up. Yes, the lap count was off from the beginning, meaning that the woman who was changing the laps and ultimately rang the bell isn’t the only one who screwed up. And yes, so many of us, including the athletes, could have noticed that 15:15 is awfully fast for the leader at DIII nationals to hit the bell lap. But for the officials, that’s their entire job.

They surely feel the deepest, most raw uncut middle school-grade embarrassment right now. I feel horrible for them, though much less empathy would be required if they simply did their jobs.

The women’s 5k debacle overshadowed three other great distance races. In an arena filled with people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, North Central’s Travis Morrison used an excellent last kilometer to beat out UW-Stout’s Patrick Jenkins for his first ever individual national title in 14:23, a three second PR. Here’s what he told me after the race:

And the two DMRs were nothing shy of thrilling. Both pre-race favorites led in the late stages, but were overtaken by dark horses. They played out very differently, though.

In the men’s race, national record holders Amherst established a very solid lead with 800 meters to go on the anchor leg. Behind them, something that would have qualified as "strange" if not for the women’s 5k was playing out. Whitewater dropped the baton very early in the race and fell about 150 meters behind. Their anchor leg, Dawson Miller, was running in lane 2 so as to avoid interfering with the actual race. But late in the leaders’ leg, Miller ended up with the chase pack about ten meters–in his case, 210 meters–behind Amherst. He appeared to say something to Eau Claire’s Josh Thorson, tucked into the rail, and Miller and Thorson actually caught Amherst anchor Greg Turissini. Once the gap was closed, Thorson powered away from the field and beat Amherst by five seconds, 9:54-9:59. La Crosse slipped in for second and the Lord Jeffs grabbed third. (That’s much better than their tenth place finish at nationals the last time they set the DMR national record in the regular season) Whitewater was later disqualified for Miller’s pacing.

Here’s what the Eau Claire boys had to say about the whole race:

And in the women’s race, Chicago‘s strategy of pulling all of their potential distance qualifiers to be fresh for the DMR appeared to pay off through 3600 meters, and at the correctly rung bell lap, Chicago anchor Brianna Hickey still had a solid lead. With 100 meters to go, Maryann Gong of pre-race favorites MIT threw in a burst that looked like it was going to end the race. Until it didn’t. Emily Gapinski of St. Thomas almost immediately responded to Gong’s burst with one of her own. Gapinski put a two second gap(-inski) on the rest of the field in those 100 meters, and crossed the line with an almost dazed look on her face.

Hopefully moments like that dominate Saturday’s action.