They may have been mauled by the Tigers, but the members of the men’s track and field team said they were satisfied after blowing by some Cantabs at Saturday’s Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet.
The Bulldogs totaled 55 points at H-Y-P but remained a distant second to Princeton’s 80-point watershed. Still, the Elis walloped the Harvard team, which finished in last place with 35 points. The Bulldogs were at their strongest on the track, where they earned all four of their event wins and notched several new individual records. In light of the respectable Eli performance against Princeton and their joint routing of the Cantabs, the Bulldogs said they look forward to competing on Harvard’s home turf at the Indoor Heptagonal Championships later this month.
“As a team, we wanted to get ourselves set for Heps in a couple weeks, and I think we did that,” sprinter Chris Tingue ’08 said. “I just wanted to go out there and set some personal bests. I think we definitely put up a good fight, and a lot of guys had good races, but Princeton was tough.”
Princeton won nine of the 17 events and dominated the field events, but the Bulldogs matched their performance on the track. Led by Brandon Giles ’08, Josh Yelsey ’05 and Casey Moriarty ’05, Elis won four of the eight individual track events. Giles, the only multiple-event winner for the Elis, won the 60-meter dash with a time of 6.99 and the 200-meter dash at 22.09, while Yelsey’s 4:10:58 took the mile race, and Moriarty’s 8:17:02 in the 3,000-meter far outpaced the Tiger competition, which trailed behind Patrick Dantzer’s ’06 8:17:46.
Giles downplayed his role in the meet, noting disappointment with his times in the 4 x 400 relay and even his victory in the 60-meter dash, but said he was glad to have contributed to the team’s strong showing.
“On the whole, I was happy with my performance,” Giles said. “By the 4 x 400, I was pretty tired. My time in the 60 was pretty slow, but I got the win and earned some points for the team.”
Sprinter and hurdler Dan O’Brien ’08 credited Giles for bolstering the team with an impressive outing, particularly in the 200-meter dash. The team’s spirits have been buoyed after H-Y-P, which served to help erase the disappointment of the previous week’s loss to Cornell, but O’Brien said the Bulldogs are more than aware of the challenges ahead.
“We just have to stay focused and keep on training hard,” he said.