Rice Cooked On The Course & Track

The longest track race available to Greg Rice of Notre Dame was the 2-mile, and he showed that wasn’t nearly long enough.

It’s not that Rice wasn’t successful at the distance. To the contrary, actually, as his last race for the Irish in 1939 made him the first in the event with two meet records in the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships at 9:02.6 (Rice had also set a meet record in 1937 with a 9:14.2). 

In fact, no one else ever set two MRs at the 2-mile distance. 

However, Rice’s senior year saw the dawn of a new national championship on this date in 1938 – cross-country, and the NCAA’s first title race. The distance was 4 miles and held in East Lansing, the first of 25-straight times on the Michigan State campus. It wouldn’t be until 1959 that the NCAA Championships regularly included the 3-mile (now 5000 meters) as part of the outdoor track & field championships. 

Rice proved himself supreme at the 4-mile distance, winning the individual title in 20:12.9 by some 3 seconds – more than either of the 1-second victories he showed in NCAA two-mile races. His Irish teammates combined with Rice to finish second behind Indiana in the team standings.

While a great new event – the NCAA Cross Country Championships – had been created, it only began to cement Rice as one of the best track runners ever. 

Rice followed his final NCAA two-mile title in 1939 with the second of five-straight AAU 5000-meter championships. From 1940-43 Rice compiled a 65-race winning streak indoors and outdoors that included multiple 2-mile and 3-mile indoor world bests. 

One of Rice’s first indoor records came in 1940 at Madison Square Garden in New York with a notable witness, Finnish great Paavo Nurmi, who said of the winner, “That Rice is the greatest distance runner the world has even seen,” according to Pat Robinson of International News Service.