Friday’s Pac-12 cross country championship is the final chapter in the story of how the conference changed the sport.
Gerry Lindgren, right, beat Steve Prefontaine at the Pac-8 Conference Cross Country Championships at Stanford University on November 15, 1969. As Washington State’s Gerry Lindgren started up a long, steep hill less than two miles into the 1969 Pac-8 cross country championships on the Stanford Golf Course he was where he had always seemed to be on the road, on the track, in life.He was full of run and confidence. The injuries and ulcer that had hounded him for the past 18 months were behind him.
Eventually Lindgren was declared the winner although the outcome remains the source of debate in running circles more than a half-century later. “The Conference of Champions is no more,” Meb Keflezighi, a Pac-10 and NCAA cross country champion at UCLA and the 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist. “It’s hard to imagine.”
And for most of the next decade, the winners wore the iconic lemon yellow with green lettering singlet of Oregon or the maroon and silver of Washington State.Conference teams and runners would dominate college cross country for the next decade and beyond. “He had immense influence on distance running in general and highlighting cross country and making it a more high profile sport in the United States especially on the West Coast,” Larsen said of Dellinger.
Dellinger guided Oregon to NCAA titles in 1971, 1973 and 1974. In the mid-70s he raised the stakes further by recruiting nationally to counter the pipeline of older Kenyan runners at Washington State, attracting schoolboy superstars like Rudy Chapa and Alberto Salazar and Manhattan transfer Matt Centrowitz to Eugene.
In the space of 80 days in 1978, Rono set world records at 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 meters as well at the 3,000 steeplechase. The previous world record-holder at 10,000 was his teammate and countryman Samson Kimombwa, runner-up to Rono in the 1976 NCAA cross country race. Rono repeated in 1977. Salazar won the 1978 NCAA race and then finished second to Rono in 1979.
But the optics of Oregon’s homegrown North American squad versus Washington State’s older, already established runners further fueled the sport’s most intense rivalry. “Terry had certain issues … they were international athletes. Terry was a very vocal kind of guy and Kimeto took offense to it. And literally started pushing each other at the starting line.”
“Stanford could be really good in cross country,” Brock recalled Thomas saying. “And it took a guy from the East Coast to figure that out.” “My father rejected me because I was weak,” Lindgren later told Sports Illustrated’s Kenny Moore, a college rival at Oregon. “He was the tough drinker. I couldn’t be his son.”“I never did have the confidence in myself,” Lindgren said in a Runner’s World interview. “I would always look at myself in the mirror, I would see that same wimpy kid that I hated as a child.”
“I roomed with him my freshman year, I hardly ever saw him. He was very much a loner. A very different personality. I always said his problems later in life you had to separate his running from his personal life. “ “I still think it’s too bad that they didn’t do a big documentary or a movie of Lindgren’s coming up through high school and winning the Russia-America meet,” Kardog said. “Because that was an unbelievable performance. Just totally out of the blue. It was one of those things that kind of ignited the distance running scene in the United States.”“He knocked the world on its ear with his indoor times and then when he beat the Russians,” Riley said.
A year later he just missed breaking Clarke’s 3-mile world record, running 12:53.0 in the wind and rain on a muddy track in a nearly empty Husky Stadium in Seattle. His 11 NCAA titles were the most ever by a track and cross country athlete, eclipsing Jesse Owens’ eight national crowns, the previous record. He won the 1966 and 1967 NCAA cross country titles and then redshirted during the 1968 season to focus on the Olympic Trials that fall.
Riley encountered that same confidence when he called Prefontaine in the spring of 1969 to make a recruiting pitch for Washington State. Three years earlier, Riley, running for Spokane’s Ferris High School, set the national high school outdoor 2-mile record . The rain-drenched, leaf-covered 6-mile course at Avery Park was a soggy, sloppy mess. The course had several stretches of pavement so WSU coach Moorberry instructed his runners to wear racing flats. Prefontaine wore adidas spikes.
“Just crazy pace,” said Kardong, who finished 14th that day. “Each of them was trying to put the other one away right from the gun.” “And he kept me out of my element the whole race. Not once would he let me go. The whole race we were neck and neck. I’d go by him and try to get a little bit of a lead and he just wouldn’t let me have it.”“And you could glance across and see Lindgren and Prefontaine and it was epic,” Brock recalled. “They were shoulder to shoulder. They were so close together they bounced off each other a few times. You knew you were watching greatness.
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