Saturday’s men’s indoor track and field meet at Harvard came down to a one-on-one showdown in the last event, the two-mile relay. Yale’s anchor, Robert LoBue ’04, delivered, winning by two-tenths of a second.
For the Elis to come back from the two-point deficit, they needed to win both the one- and two-mile relays. Harvard needed to win only one of the relays to hang on for a victory.
Yale won both.
Daniel Ireland, who coaches Yale’s distance runners, called the meet the best overall performance all year. He said everyone watched the last relay, knowing it would decide the meet.
“The whole place was up all the way around the track,” Ireland said. “They all mobbed LoBue at the finish line.”
The other runners in the two-mile relay were Mark Falco ’06, Reed Mauser ’05 and Matthew Boshart ’06.
“If [Falco, Mauser and Boshart] didn’t run their races, I couldn’t have finished it the way I did,” LoBue said. “The [mile relay] guys had a lot of pressure on them, and they delivered, too.”
The Bulldogs posted 10 first-place finishes in the dual meet and swept the weight throw for a final score of 72-64.
Team captain Allen Czerwinski ’03 won the weight throw. Czerwinski said he approached both relay teams before the final events to let them know Yale’s fate was in their hands.
“It was one of the most impressive endings to a meet I’ve ever been a part of,” Czerwinski said.
Other highlights for the Bulldogs included Jihad Beauchman’s ’06 and Nathan Lawrie’s ’04 victories in high jump and shot put, respectively. Beauchman narrowly took the high jump, winning only because Harvard’s Clifford Emmanuel ’06 faulted more at lower heights. Beauchman took second in the triple jump, too.
Lawrie, who has had knee problems, added three more points with his second-place finish in the weight throw. Both athletes led the Bulldogs with eight points each.
LoBue said the team hopes to improve its Heptagonal finish from last year. Heptagonals will take place at Dartmouth on March 1 and March 2.
“People are starting to believe,” LoBue said. “It’s a young team with a lot of talent.”
The Bulldogs would like to finish in the top four at the Heptagonal Championship, assistant coach David Shoehalter said.
“If everybody competes like they can, it’s a realistic goal,” Shoehalter said. “We’re very young. There’s no telling how those young guys are going to compete. You hope that they will step it up and compete well.”
Placing as a team in the top four at Heptagonals, Czerwinski said, is a realistic goal, if the Bulldogs perform well. He said the team will decrease its practice mileage but run faster in the two weeks before the championship.
“Our guys really need to continue what they showed on Saturday,” Shoehalter said. “They started believing on Saturday.”