Favorites overcome their history as Flanagan, BYU win

By Parker Morse

After being a contender every year, Shalane Flanagan wins her first NCAA title.

The NCAA women's Cross Country Championship for both teams and individuals featured favorites trying to overcome their history. Shalane Flanagan has been close to NCAA titles before, even taking the lead in last year's cross country championship with what seemed like a decisive move before falling apart and finishing 22nd. BYU has won NCAA titles before, including '97, '99, and '01, but title defenses just weren't happening for the Cougars.

This year, however, was framed perfectly for UNC junior Flanagan. "I feel like every year I get stronger and faster," she said before the race. She arrived in Terre Haute undefeated over the 2002 cross season, the only runner with a perfect record. She also became a local favorite in Terre Haute, despite her Massachusetts background: her mother, a former marathon world-record holder as Cheryl Bridges, is in host Indiana State University's sports hall of fame.

BYU came to the Wabash Valley Sports Center undefeated as well, but shared that distinction with another deep team, Stanford. Coach Pat Shane conceded that some pressure came with BYU's title defense and number-one ranking, but he did what he could to deflect it, doing his best to remove the definite article "the" from in front of the word "favorite" when BYU was discussed.

More than anything, however, BYU emphasized team. Michaela Manova, when asked about her race strategy, emphasized the importance of having her teammates around her on race day. Of course, Manova's attempt to dye her pale-blonde hair blue turned green in the unexpected Monday sun. "It's easy to spend the day before the meet sitting in your hotel room getting nervous," said junior Katie Martin. Instead, Coach Shane took the team to a youth "fireside" inspirational with an LDS congregation in the Terre Haute area, where the team talked about running with an audience of 500, many of whom came out to the course on Monday.

When the race finally began, it was no surprise that Toledo star and Great Lakes Region winner Brianna Shook, a habitual front-runner, bolted out to the early lead. Within half a mile, Shook had thirty meters of open space between her and the bulk of the pack. By a mile it was forty. Flanagan split the difference between Shook and the pack, which included Anderson, Manova, the Yale twins Laura and Kate O'Neill, and three Stanford runners, Lauren Fleshman, Sara Bei, and Alicia Craig.

By two kilometers, however, Flanagan had taken over, and Shook was absorbed by the pack. As the course looped back to the starting area and past the halfway mark, Flanagan was out in front, running smoothly and with a solid, if not unassailable, lead. At 3k, she had nine seconds lead on the pack. Shook was running with a dwindling pursuit pack, and nobody seemed ready to take off after Flanagan.

And after all the agonizing and anticipation on the part of Flanagan's fans ("I think everyone who knows me was more nervous than I was about this race," she said afterward), that was all it took. She ran essentially unchallenged to the finish to take her first NCAA title in a course-record 19:36.0, just under ten seconds ahead of everyone else -- almost the same lead she had held at halfway.

Behind Flanagan in the finishing straight, the pack resolved as a comet trailing one of her frequent high school victims. Kate O'Neill, another Massachusetts product who admitted she never got quite so close to Flanagan in high school, played out her race plan perfectly and wound up doing much better than she had expected herself. "I wanted to stay with the leaders until the last kilometer, and then see what I could do," O'Neill said afterward. "I thought maybe I could get top five." Her twin sister Laura finished eleventh, scoring 13 in the unofficial "twins race" and losing by only two places to the Torres brothers' one-ten finish in the men's race.

The ISU meet organization used ChampionChip mats at the 3k split and the finish line in an attempt to speed up the scoring, and were therefore able to announce early in the second lap that Stanford led BYU by a single point in team scoring at halfway. As the pack entered the homestretch, it looked like a head-to-head battle at the front of the race, with Stanford taking the early lead. The Cardinal got Craig in third and Fleshman in fourth (scoring two and three points, respectively, since O'Neill's place did not count for the team race) and the Cougars delivered Manova in fifth and Anderson in seventh. With Malindi Elmore just outside the top ten, Stanford was leading after three runners, but here BYU's deeper pack paid off. Katie Martin, Brianne Sandberg and Jaime Cottle completed the scoring for BYU before Stanford's fourth and fifth, Sara Bei and Erin Sullivan, wrapped up for the Cardinal.

Then came a moment of confusion, as the race announcer read the unofficial scores over the loudspeaker, giving Stanford the win by a few dozen points. It appeared that Stanford's strong front-running might have carried the day, but Coach Shane wasn't convinced. "I don't buy it," he said. "We had five in before their fourth. It's possible we may have lost, but I can't figure out how." It turned out that some four or five finishes had been lost in the data transfer from the chip boxes at the finish to the scoring booth, including one of BYU's scorers. Within minutes the certified results were announced: BYU successfully defended their title, 85 points to Stanford's 113.

"I ran the best I could," said Manova. "If Stanford ran the best they could, and they won, they deserved it."

"It's not often that two undefeated teams get together at the national championship," said Shane. "It will make Thanksgiving turkey taste awfully good. But I'm going to be really sore tomorrow [from running around the course]."

"Even before they announced we had won, we were pleased with how we raced," said Stanford's Craig. "So now, when we know we didn't win, we're still pleased."

Great Lakes champions Notre Dame finished third behind a strong sixth-place performance by freshman Molly Huddle. Georgetown and Colorado rounded out the top five.